chapter 5 - et lille lys inde i mig forsvinder
Either Dave is finding a new way to screw you over, or you've managed to fuck everything up even more than you thought was possible, because there's no way the thing hovering in front of you is real.
Still, the kid keeps looking back and forth between you and the half-translucent robot, one strap of his backpack slung over his shoulder. Shadow the Edgehog, on his part, has shut up for the first time this loop. You were kind of hoping he could explain this to the kid, but he seems adamant on being as much of a pain in the ass as possible. He leans back against the sofa, but he's careless in his positioning—half his leg is clipping through it.
“Don't worry about it,” you manage, since Dave is clearly ready to jump out of his skin at every single move you make, “he's probably not real.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean,” the cyborg asks, turning to you with the glowing red points of his eyes narrowed.
“Like you don't already know,” you respond. You hate to admit it, but the whole robot shades situation does look pretty cool. You wonder how much money you'd have to pour into responsive LED lights and work them in as a layer in your own shades. Some Terminator type shit. The cyborg lifts an eyebrow, and sends you a look you thought you'd be through with when you left your brother behind.
Whether the robot agrees with your assessment of the situation or not doesn't really matter. You just hope he's thinking along the same track as you—even if the kid hasn't shown any signs of having as overt hallucinations or psychotic episodes as you do, the only reason you know your own tells is because you've gone through enough footage of your own episodes to spot them. You don't have any experience with dealing with other people's hallucinations.
Speaking of, what the hell is that damn puppet up to oh WHY HELLO DIRK fucking hell why did you DIDYA MISS ME have to think that.
The damn thing plops down right on your head. You freeze for a moment, unwilling to move with your vision obscured by the puppet limbs now dangling off your cap.
“Jesus fucking Christ where the hell did he come from,” the cyborg says, and as you reach to grab the puppet off your head, you turn to face him again.
“You didn't get the—?”
You gesture at your face, trying to get across the overwhelming sensation of orange. The motion is complicated by the fact that Cal is still in the hand that you're gesturing with. You give up, throwing him right at the weird transluscent manifestation of a part of your brain that absolutely cannot be actually there instead of trying to explain further.
“Dude,” it says, as the plush body of Cal bounces right off the shimmer of the cyborg, “don't just go throwing Cal at people.”
Considering the fact that the cyborg's body phased right through everything it's been trying to interface with so far, this is... concerning.
“And to answer your question, no, I did not,” he says, which is also concerning. He seems to think so too, by the way he glances down at the puppet. Ah, the downside to glowing points tracking your eyesight. Would mean anyone could actually see where you're looking. Plus, it'd be a pain in the ass to figure out how to make them without blinding yourself with the constant LED exposure directly to your eyeballs.
JUST YOU AND ME AGAINST THE WORLD, PARDNER, Cal pipes up from the floor, familiar orange flashing against your eyelids when you blink. yeah, imagine that but bright emergency red. all the time. those shades would suck, dude.
“Still waiting on the answer to that question, by the way,” Dave says, piping up from where he's still standing in the doorway to his room. “Not really sold on the him not being real.”
He puts down the backpack as nonchalantly as is possible when you're a teen who's just been caught trying to run away from home, which is to say not very. Still, he manages to saunter up to the cyborg pretty convincingly, one hand still half in his pocket. Casting spurious glances around the room, he speaks up without looking directly at you.
”Tentatively ruling out that that's a hologram, I guess. Don't think you'd be able to develop holograms without a screen before the guys doing Miku concerts—fuck, we'd be living in a fucking mansion by now just from the royalties. Can't spot any projectors, either, so the 3D light hologram idea's off the table, too. ”
At this point he's made his way up to the sofa and is standing right across from the cyborg.
“It's probably just some weird mirror shit making it look like he's kinda transparent, right? So if I do something like this—”
He sticks his hand right through the cyborg's chest. Looks down at it, then up at the cyborg's face, and then back down.
“Whatthefuckisthateven—” he says, pulling his hand back with a flinch.
“Like I said. Probably not real,” you say, putting your hands behind your head and leaning back on the sofa. “Only reason Cal doesn't go through him is probably because of some kind of weird metaphysical aspect we both ascribe that most dearest of puppets which has created a basis for a shared hallucination.”
“Shared hallucination. Sure. That works.” Dave says from where he's standing, one hand absentmindedly rubbing the one he just stuck through the cyborg. “What the fuck do you mean by that? I know you're crazy and all, but like... is this like a whole thing that's just going to be happening now? Strider brothers psychosis bonding time?”
“You shouldn't be too worried,” the cyborg says, crossing his arms, “it'd be a bigger problem if we were talking first-degree relatives.”
He narrows the pin-prick reds of his eyes again, looking at some point on the ceiling you know is probably empty.
“Although... the heritability is still pretty high, all things considered. That probably wouldn't help, either.”
“The heritability of what,” Dave says, voice inching into panic.
A grimace runs across the cyborg's face, and he looks over at you. You sigh.
“It's complicated,” you opt for saying, “but me seein' this is probably just my brain overloadin' itself and you seein' that,” you nod over at the cyborg, “is yours tryin' to make some kinda sense of why the hell I'm talkin' so much. Occam's razor.”
“You're saying that's the simplest explanation for this?”
You shrug and turn your gaze towards the ceiling, your hands still behind your head. The motion makes you sink a little deeper into the pillow.
“Nothin' more unreliable than the human mind.”
From the corner of your eye, you see Dave turn towards the cyborg. He also shrugs. It's actually impressive, seeing it from the outside. He really does look like a grade-A douche—which must mean you also do. Shitty, self-degrading poetry in motion.
“Demonstrably untrue. If the mind had the half-life of, say, neon-35, it would've been a lot harder for human civilization to develop,” your own voice, strange and distorted, comes from the robot.
“Yeah, well,” you say, “we can't have everything we wish for, can we.”
You run your hand through your hair, trying to stave off the headache to no avail. Dave doesn't say anything for a moment, and you're just about to stand up when he speaks.
“Wait, okay, just so we're on the same page,” he says, looking up to where the cyborg's been slowly drifting towards the ceiling, “d'you not like, have a name?”
“'Course he doesn't. It's me. Doesn't make sense to call him something else.”
The robot scoffs at that. You glare at it, daring it to say whatever it's holding back. When it stays quiet, you narrow your eyes at it.
“If y'got something to say, say it.”
“Just thinking that if that is the case, you probably wouldn't want to keep referring to me as something separate from yourself, seein' as you'd be the premier expert on th' matter and all.”
He starts rolling into an exagerated drawl by the end of the sentence. You refuse to acknowledge this as a contribution to any kind of monologue, dialogue or trialogue currently ongoing, and you're left in a stalemate as neither you nor the abortion coughed up by your unwell brain speak. The kid crosses his arms, looking back and forth between the two of you. After some time, you consider sniping back at the robot, but before you feel the words crawl up through your mouth, Dave interrupts.
“Okay, fuck this, he's getting a name,” he says, face planted firmly in his palm. “I'm not exactly sold on the hallucination theory—actually, you know what, I'm going to start haggling for it. You're telling me this guy, who, by the way, just said more than ten words in a sentence, is just both of our brains getting fucked enough by all this weird-ass loop thing that I'm getting your hallucinations too? I'm calling bullshit.”
“Sure, if you want to make this a huge fucking deal, princess,” you say, rolling your eyes.
“Not taking any suggestions from guys who don't have to deal with one more Bro-flavoured douche than usual,” he snipes back, “I'm starting to think that you're the biggest tool of the two. Yo, robot guy.”
Dave snaps his finger at your double. The cyborg blinks, nonplussed. Freaky face to see on your own, even if it's got those weird faceplates. Maybe because it's freaky because it's got the faceplaces. You don't expect a robot to be confused, much less be able to express it.
“I can't keep calling you RoBro in my head, that's just stupid. Come on, man, give me something to work with here.”
The cyborg shrugs, letting out a non-committal hum, and then looks over at you for longer than you think is entirely necessary. You furrow your eyebrows, frown at him. Can't he figure something out himself? If he's so insistent that he's not just you, he can do his own god damn homework.
“Okay, fuck, fine,” Dave says, throwing his hands in the air like he's begging for anything, just a scrap of anything he could call this guy, “give us something to work with, man, we need some material. Cool robots or something. R2's up there, but he's the total opposite color scheme. T2's pretty obvious, too, but then there's the question of whether your full name is Terminator 2, and that's a pretty fuckin' long name for anyone to have—B2? Bro 2? Naw, scratch that, that's way to close to a boyband name or something—like the opposite of that J-Pop band with 200 members, it's just two guys—”
When you look over at the thing leaning against the sofa, red eyes trained on the kid, an uneasy chill runs over your back and down through your hands. There's a hollow in the back of your head that's getting hard to ignore—like running your tongue over the still-sore spot where a tooth's been extracted. You know there's something missing, but you still can't keep yourself from poking at it even though you know you shouldn't.
“Hal,” you say, before Dave gets started on a tangent about the naming schemes of pop groups. He blinks at the interruption, blush creeping up his face. You really couldn't have cared less, but this is someone your brain made up. You might as well get to pick the stupid goddamn obvious homicidal AI name. Hal hums.
“Sure you don't wanna add any numbers to that?” he asks, smug look already making its home on his face. He's even leaning back on whatever invisible surface he's floating on, the smartass.
“Shut up,” you say. “It's short for hallucination.”
“Sure,” Hal says, “whatever you say.”
“Anyway,” you say, kicking yourself upright from where you've been sinking into the couch and planting your elbows firmly on your knees, “what the hell just happened?”
Dave looks between you and the robot before the silence between you indicates that maybe, just maybe, the question was directed at him.
“Shit went haywire, man,” he starts, already on the defensive. “Seriously, I have no fucking clue.”
Deflection. Time to see if you can pry whatever he knows out of him.
“I'm guessin' you can still do your little tricks,” you say, rolling your shoulder and wincing at the sound it makes against your back.
Dave blinks up at you through his sunglasses.
“I haven't really... tried?” he says, pitch rising at the very end as if it's a question on a test he's expecting you to correct him on. You raise an eyebrow at him.
“And?” you say—there's a slight shift in the air, like a draft going through the apartment, and there's no one in front of you. Looking around, you spot Dave by the kitchen counter, slightly out of breath.
“It's—fine,” he says, in between breaths. “A bit harder than normal, though.”
That's something, at least—he hasn't completely lost control of whatever power he's grasped.
“Alright,” you say, “so what went haywire?”
Dave stays unusually quiet, a tight grimace barely held back—you can see it in the way his shoulders tense up.
“I just kind of lost it. The loop. Or whatever the hell was keeping the loop away from the stream of actual time. Something like that. Don't think it matters that much, anyway.”
He trails off at the end. There's something weighing on him, something he isn't telling you.
“Speak up, kid,” you say, “neither of us are getting anywhere like this.”
You pretend not to hear the way Hal says “none, not neither,” under his, presumably unneeded, what with him being a robot and all, breath.
“You're sayin' something went haywire. Now, I ain't going to say correlation equals causation, but—”
“It's the next best thing we have here,” Hal finishes for you, and you shoot him a glance that should, by all rights, have fried his wires.
Dave groans, crosses his arms.
“Okay, fine,” he says, “just think of it like...”
He stops for a moment, clearly trying to find the right words. There's a slight shift, and you think you can see him glance just off to the side, towards one of the cinderblock stacks.
“There's this big ball of yarn I've been handed,” he starts, voice edging further and further into frustration with each syllable, “and someone—I don't know who, maybe the concept of time or something, which is also what the ball of yarn represents, except the thing handing the ball to me is like an actual being that's entrusting me with its child or something, anyway, this thing asks me to hold onto its precious little yarn ball baby no matter what, but the moment it fucks off a mechanism goes off that is aimed directly at my kneecaps is activated and I crumple like wet paper the second it makes impact, which makes the ball of yarn go tumbling from my hands in a glorious comedic snapshot montage of the arc it makes as it unravels in its travel through the air, and also the ball of yarn being unravelled is like taking the sad little thing out of its time yarn ball baby NICU, and I need to wind that thing up before the big concept of time comes back in and gets pissed as all hell at me for unravelling its baby and letting it get all over the apartment.”
As he speaks, his gesturing gets ever more animated, and at the end of it he's miming scooping up the woolly entrails of the metaphorical time yarn infant. Noticing your expression, he flushes and quickly shoves his hands into his pockets again, retreating into the quote unquote cool demeanor he wears like a badly-fitting suit.
“Or something like that.” He sniffs. “Point is, I don't know if I can fix it except if I start trying to gather up the yarn and try to roll it back into that ball.”
The robot looks seems to go through some filing system you can't see, a fan whirring to life, and you wonder what conclusion this locked-off part of you is reaching. For what it's worth, a low pressure is building in the back of your eyelids, so you suspect it's something you wouldn't want to know. Or at least, not something that would be worth revisiting consciously. Cal's propped himself up by the television, orange eyes persistent in their gaze.
“So some kind of breakdown,” Hal says, “leading to the whole thing spinning out of your control and getting pushed out into something—external?”
A cold wave runs over your skin at the words—you know they're pointed at you. You don't like where this is going.
Dave is visibly on guard now, faux-relaxed stance back over his shoulders as he looks at the robot.
“Don't know if it's something external, but I guess so. Ain't my jurisdiction anymore, that's for sure.”
“It might be something like—” Hal starts, glancing over at you, but you manage to fix him with a look. You cannot start talking about Cal. That would bring up a lot more questions than answers, and you don't need the kid more confused than he already is.
If this is anything like Cal, you'll have plenty of time to figure it out.
Then again, if it's anything like Cal, it might just keep going forever.
IF IT'S ANYTHING LIKE ME, Cal hiss-laughs from where he's climbed up and draped himself across the television, orange running across the tip of your mind, YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST GET RID OF THE KID. CUT IT OFF AT THE ROOT.
That.
That isn't.
You try not to react visibly. Hal and Dave are looking, and
you need to say something, because Hal's mouth just moved, turned back to Dave, and you didn't hear anything.
You hum vaguely, hope that's a decent enough response.
Hal raises an eyebrow at you, but keeps going.
“Anyway, if you still have some degree of control of it, that shouldn't be a problem.”
Dave nods. You don't know what expression that is on his face, but it doesn't matter. You're fine. You're back. You let your hand run through your hair, the mild tug of your scalp putting you further into your body again.
“Loop started 'cause of the strife, right?” you say, letting yourself sprawl back over the futon. “If we recreate the events leading up to it, we might get closer to the start condition.”
“What, and it'll just sort itself out?”
You shrug.
“Fuck if I know,” you say, “I'm not the guy with time powers.”
Dave throws his hands up in prostration to an uncaring god. cad, 11/19/2010, misinformationalized.
“Fuckin',” he says, “fine.”
“Get your stuff ready,” you say, leaning your head back against the back of the futon as hard as you can and cracking your neck. “Get up there.”
Dave raises an eyebrow at you.
“Ain't this supposed to be mimicking whatever the hell happened the first time,” he says, voice deliberately neutral.
“The exact circumstances don't matter, in my experience. Reflex is one hell of a drug. Shouldn't be too hard to redo.”
Something has him hesitating for a moment. The look on his face is unreadable, and you feel a well of irritation stir in you at the sight.
“Get the fuck up there. I need to talk to this freak,” you say, pointing at Hal, “like the singular adult we are.”
Dave jumps, retreats into his room and scuttles out towards the stairs. That should give him enough time to get antsy about the whole thing. Besides, you do need to talk to whatever this thing you're calling Hal is. Even when you've had hallucinations in the past, you've always been able to sense their intentions—or at least, get enough of an idea of their intentions that you know how to approach them.
Cal laughs at you from his place on the TV, but not loud enough to drown out everything else. You stand up, letting the puppet stay in your peripheral vision rather than let him fully out of sight. Still, your focus shifts to Hal, leaning with one elbow placed on something you can't see. You doubt it's real, whatever it is. He just wants to look like he's relaxed, or something.
This is new. Hal is new. You don't know this thing, not like this. You don't know what he might do next. It's the first time you've looked at something you know is wholly a creation of your own mind and not known what it could do to you.
At least, you think, for what little degree of comfort it gives you, he doesn't know what you're going to do, either. An emergency exit highlighted by streamers of bright orange burns in the corners of your eyes.
You're stuck like this for a good few moments, both of you apparently waiting for the first blow that neither is willing to deal. Finally, after a good few moments, Hal speaks.
“So what's your actual idea with all this?” comes the pointed question from the robot.
He's floating in front of you, arms now crossed rather than perched upon an unseen shelf or whatever. He raises an eyebrow at you, and the image of a kindergarten teacher reprimanding a child flits across your mind. lol yeah okay thats pretty accurate. You twitch. Hal remains, questioning. You need to control yourself—you can't let childish tantrums get the better of you. A breath, in, out. When you speak, your voice is deliberately relaxed.
“Stress. Get him back to the point where he has no other choice than to do something that drastic. If the loop isn't under his control at all any more, we need to get that advantage back.”
You don't like it, as such, but it is still the best idea you have. Looking at Hal's expression, eyebrows furrowed, you suspect he's thinking along the same lines—his face is locked in a strange grimace of resignation, and when he meets your eyes, the tenseness lets up, if only a miniscule amount.
“If the loop is a way for him to regain control of a situation, put him in one where he has no choice but get control back.”
The miniscule amount of tenseness he'd let go of returns. He runs his hand through his hair, white strands shimmering, letting out a hiss through his teeth. A fan whirring.
“I want it on the record that I think this is a shitty idea,” he says, pointing at you.
“Of course you do.” You fix him with a look. “But it's not like we have a lot of other options, is it.”
He doesn't answer, which is just as good as a yes, but I hate admitting that you're right, so I'm not going to acknowledge it. Even if you can't tell exactly what he's thinking, he's still something your brain cooked up. If you weren't able to spot your own tells, you wouldn't have gotten this far.
Cal clacks away from his spot on the TV.
⁙
You make your way up to the roof again after picking out a sword—it isn't one that you'd ever use normally, too heavy for any of the maneuvers you like to do, but this isn't about pushing Dave to his limits. Or at least not in the way you'd normally lean towards, drilling in the proper stances until they're mindless. This is about administering a shock. This is about getting out the defibrillator. Having him on edge from the start would be counter to everything you're trying to do, and this way you can at least get his defenses down a little before the blow. You're sure he knows which swords you keep sharp and which ones you don't.
When you get up there, Dave's pacing back and forth—he stops in the middle of a turn when he realizes you're here, and he visibly takes a breath to calm himself down. Then, without a word, he moves into stance. He pauses when he sees your sword though, a flash of irritation across his face.
“Hey, what the shit, man,” he says,“I thought we were gonna do it the same way.”
“Nah, this ain't for training,” you say, absentmindedly running your hand across the dull steel—it would take a lot of force to get this to cut anything at all, you think, it's more of a blunt weapon than a blade—and feeling its weight in your hand, “this is to get your brain thinking it's in control again. Can't do that without a couple changes.”
“Gee, thanks for telling me,” he says, “really helps with the whole feeling in control thing that you're just outright saying that you're doing this to trick my brain into believing something that isn't true.”
“Would it have been better if I didn't tell you?” you ask, and he doesn't respond, brow furrowing.
“Thought not,” you say.
You breathe in. Out.
You charge.
Again, you fall into a rhythm. This time, though, you keep looking for an opening he isn't covering, trying to work out the best timing to go all-out.
Adrenaline, that's what he needs. A burst that's strong enough to override everything else.
If you can still get past him, that's a failure on his part. If you can't, it shouldn't be that hard to fix whatever he fucked up. Either way, you're getting back to the weird normal that's been engraved in your mind now, even if it means letting the kid bend and break by your own hand.
The sooner he learns the lesson, the better. You are not to be trusted. If he takes this to its conclusion—and you're very willing to go through however many loops it takes for him to reach it—, he will eventually learn that your death does not matter enough for him to undo it.
Still, a worry persists.
He should have been relieved. To be rid of you at all. It doesn't make sense to you that, even when there was no direct exposure to violence, he would panic enough to turn back the clock rather than try to find a way through. Have you made him too dependent on you in some strange, backwards fashion?
Another thing is bothering you, too. His eyes. A perfect mirror to your brother's, so much so that you thought it was your brain fucking with you—retribution for letting the kid in on even a sliver of why you took him in. But no—he's got a ring of crimson around his pupils now. Just like your brother. There's something wrong, but you can't pinpoint what.
why do you want everything to make sense.
Why do we as people want to find meaning in the things that happen around and to us? Gee, I wonder, you think, it's almost as if we aren't really made to exist without finding some kind of pattern in the kaleidoscopic and dizzying size of the world we live in. Dave pushes in, and you dodge mindlessly.
no, why do you want everything to make narrative sense. you're so caught up in dichotomies it's embarrassing. villain and hero, body and soul, brothers fundamentally opposed. no shit that when you try to fit everything into one of two categories you freak out when something doesn't. not everything fits into your neat little systems.
Hold on, you think, body and soul?
yeah, dipshit. just because some metaphysical plane has opened itself up to you to toy with as you please doesn't mean your brother's bound to the physical. he might have some weird whole other thing going on that we have absolutely no part in.
Okay, great, good we cleared that up, you think, parrying another blow. Now what the fuck do you mean by that, asshole?
you already know where i'm going with this, asshole. dave's got your brother's eyes. what else do you think he got from him.
That's—you flinch, the thought punching all breath out of you before you can stop it.
That doesn't prove anything, you think, because the shadow of what that means looms heavier than anything else you can even begin to imagine.
Let's go down the list.
You and your brother both have some kind of supernatural powers. This is already a decently large pill to swallow, but you've done it once and you didn't choke on it, so there you go.
Yours, as far as you know, have to do with the metaphysical—or, at least, what passes for the metaphysical. You don't know to what extent, but it's safe to assume you can manipulate the people around you to some degree. There's a reason you've managed to slip unnoticed through many situations that would have ended in disaster for anyone else—not that it's an easy fix to all your problems. There's no way to keep the process running continually, since it messes with your already-fragile mental state. You haven't actively used it for a long time, as far as you can remember—it requires a firm grasp on the people around you, a skill you are sorely lacking in. Control of cognition requires being able to understand how others interpret the world. It's control of the process connecting the signals that your senses send to the brain with the intangible world of thought built from analyzing and creating patterns, the interplay that creates one's experience of reality. The soul, for lack of a better term.
Your brother's have to do with the physical. yeah, sure, and we all know what assuming makes ya. In your defense, it's hard not to assume that. You bear the evidence for it on your own body, look at it in the mirror every fucking day. Whatever some odd part of your mind insists, you're not working with an entirely clean slate here—even if you're lacking most of the pieces, the edge of the puzzle has been put into place ages ago. The human body makes up the most base level of how one interacts with the physical world. There is no way to analyze data if you cannot collect it.
Plus, you can't help it. When the opportunity for a pattern emerges, the human mind will strike upon it without hesitation. If one holds power over the soul, the other must hold power over its opposite.
So: a duality. A coin, each side bearing a part of the human condition. The soul, inextricably linked to the body, which in turn cannot operate without the soul.
If anything goes wrong in the connection between the two...
You're walking proof of what happens. Two kids fuck up putting the pieces back together and create something that wasn't supposed to exist. Something like divine punishment, you'd say, if you weren't a staunch atheist. Fuck, you're straight-up cribbing that from Fullmetal Alchemist, aren't you? Probably not. If you'd already met God, maybe, but so far, no dice.
Plus, something happened to both of you that made you the freaks you are today. The eyes are the windows to the soul, or whatever the hell. It's a flimsy theory, but it's the only thing you've had for years—the weird-ass eye colors the two of you got had to have come from somewhere.
The point is that if your brother's powers are something other than what you think, you're—
A sharp sting brings you back to the present, and it takes you a moment to realize what's happened—you've dropped your sword without realizing, and at the incoming attack from Dave you've raised your arm to parry the strike instead of dodging. An instant, and Dave has already retreated.
“Jesus Christ, dude,” he says, still holding his sword, “what the fuck are you doing?”
He doesn't seem too shocked at the sight of your blood. Must have gotten desensitized after the first go round.
“Guess that didn't do it,” you say, rather than answer his question. This is good. His guard's down, even if this isn't the way you were planning to lower it.
“No shit,” he says, “not when we've already done that a million fucking times.”
He's about to say something more when you duck and grab your sword again, a quick readjustment of your grip and then a swing, flat of the blade against the side of his calf, making him buckle. The only reason it works is because he isn't expecting it. A gasp, and he's gritting his teeth, trying to find his balance.
Another second to right himself—one that you take away from him with a tackle—he's still smaller than you, even if it's only by a couple inches. He certainly isn't stronger than you. He hasn't had the time to build up the muscle, not properly. The hand holding his sword is crushed against the pavement, sending it skittering across the cement. You right yourself as he tries to wriggle away, keeping the knee that you aren't lifting yourself with planted firmly on his ankle.
You breathe in, out, in, out—you hope you haven't fucked up any joints beyond repair—the thought runs through your mind before you can stop it, almost an instinct, before you dismiss it. You already know none of this is going to be permanent.
jesus fucking christ man, what the hell are you doing to him.
You just need to hurt him. Just enough for the adrenaline spike to register, for the panic response to kick in. This is better than the alternative.
This is better than whatever Cal had in mind.
he was just saying that to rile you up, you idiot. let go of the kid.
He's squirming under you. You just need to do it. COME THE FUCK ON. Like a fish, you think dazedly, trying to get out from under the butcher on the chopping block. You don't have the knife. You look around. It's too far away, you wouldn't be able to grab it while keeping the thing from slipping away. You've never done this before. YOU PUSSY. Your hands shake, trying to figure out what to do. Breath, inoutinoutinoutinout like gasping. Fish gills. Opening and closing. Drowning on dry land. Hurt animals will do anything. It's better to put them out of their misery. Minimize the pain.
YOU KNOW THAT THING ABOUT CHICKENS? HOW THEY'LL RUN AROUND AFTER YOU CUT THEIR HEAD OFF?
shut the fuck up you orange freak you are not doing this we are not doing this you are going to keep still you're going to let the kid go and stand the fuck up and—
A sharp pain. It spreads from the middle of your face, familiar in the sick crunch that reverbs through your head.
A moment passes. You're looking up directly into the sky, a sound of something against the cement, and you rewind the past few seconds in your mind.
Dave punched you in the face. He shoved you off. You're lying on your back, and Dave's scrambling to get to his sword.
Well, at least you know that won't work now.
“You piece of shit,” Dave shouts. His voice is panicked. Cracks. That's normal, you think. He's a teen. Puberty and all that.
what the fuck is wrong with you.
You aren't. You're breaking down. This loop is wearing down at every part of you, too fast to keep track. You thought you'd have more time.
we're never going to teach him how to drive. or shave. or do anything except fight.
You sit up. Your hands feel like they're covered in layers and layers of cloth.
“What the fuck was that,” he continues, sounding like he's out of breath, “fuck, I should have fucking known, can't have shit in Houston, of course you were gonna do something like this, why the fuck did I ever trust you—”
He keeps going, a drone that rises in pitch behind you as you stand up and grab the sword. You go towards the stairs, which makes him pause in his mutterings, and, ah, shit, you're bleeding all over the place. Red all over the stairs. Light-headed, too, which is making it hard to get down the stairs without falling ass over tea-kettle. That's blood loss for you.
You do get down eventually. You nearly jump out of your skin when you see someone in the apartment that isn't Dave, but it's just Hal. He hovers by the futon, looking over his shoulder over at where you're coming in.
“Shit's real boring when you can't interact with anything, you know,” he says. “I've been trying to possess the TV for the past thirty minutes.”
He looks at the way you're trying to keep some kind of pressure on the wound on your arm. When you don't reply, he speaks up again.
“Guessin' it didn't work.”
You don't answer. You grab the kitchen roll from off the counter.
You stand by the sink, and there's an odd sense of deja-vu as you press the paper towel against the wound. You hear Dave come in, a hesitant click before he hurries inside, throwing his sword on the floor and turning on the TV.
“Sup, Hal,” is all he says, voice a controlled monotone. He grabs a controller, sits down on the futon. Hal casts a sidelong glance at you before taking his place on the futon beside Dave.
piece of shit can't even sit down on that thing. he's probably just hovering right above the cushions. asshole.
You keep yourself leaning down over the sink.
⁙
The clock on the microwave hits 5:15.
Fred Durst welcomes you to yet another day that's just one of those days. While you agree with him that you don't particularly want to wake up, neither do you want to listen to his fucking voice.
Before you think of any new creative ways to destroy your phone, though, your eyes meet the same hovering figure of Hal that greeted you when you woke up the last time.
“Why the hell are you still here,” you say, because you genuinely can't find a reason for this thing to still be bothering you.
“Don't ask me,” he answers, because of course he doesn't know. Your brain doesn't know what to make of itself at the best of times, why should it when you've been slowly driven to the breaking point through endless repetition without the catharsis of pain to break through the cloudy glass sliding into place over your consciousness with every note of Fred Durst's voice? You grab your shades. At least you have those.
Your just real fuckin' depressing inner monologue gets interrupted without fanfare as Dave opens the door and resolutely ignores you, heading straight for the kitchen and putting water over to boil. He starts getting out every single pack of instant noodle you have in the cabinets, laying them out on the counter. When the water's boiling, he grabs a bowl, rips open two of the packages and unceremoniously dumps the contents of them into the bowl before pouring the water in.
“Hey, what the hell are you doing, kid,” you ask, because this is the first time you recall him running out like that at the start of the loop. Hal's gone dead quiet beside you, focused on Dave with the intensity of a hawk. Weird as hell.
“What does it look like,” he says, without even turning to look over at you, eyes trained on the bowl that's clearly just about to spill over, “you're the only one who's gotten to fuck around doing stuff that doesn't have consequences. What if I want that for myself, huh? Maybe I just want to eat instant ramen until I get sick. Doesn't matter if we run out, 'cause it's gonna reset tomorrow anyway. Or today, I guess. Fuck. Quarter past 5.”
As he talks, he starts poking at the noodles with a fork he's fished out of somewhere.
“Shit, you wasted a fucking month not doing shit like this? I'd thought you'd gone out in the pickup and done the Purge stuff ages ago. See if you could climb a building using your katanas as axes. That kinda stuff.”
You think about the car. A bitter taste rises in the back of your mouth at the reminder of your unsuccessful escape attempt. yeah, you shouldn't have fucking done that, you idiot—the fuck would you even have done if you'd gotten there?
A thought flits across your mind, though, replacing the bitterness with a nagging question, one you've been ignoring for far too long. If the car didn't get reset, where the hell did it go?
“Yeah, well, it isn't exactly easy to get—”
As Hal's about to speak, an ungodly sound arises from the corner of the room behind you. Like bubbles of oil bursting in the windpipe of a rotting corpse, it quickly disperses only to build up again, each time more intense than the last. You have no idea what to call it until you turn back, following Dave's now-enraptured gaze to where the sound is coming from. You realize quickly, in the same breath as Hal hisses out a swear, what it is.
It is, in the loosest of terms, a laugh.
“OH GOODY,” Cal cackles from his spot under the desk, “NOW THE GEARHEAD ISN'T THE ONLY ONE HAVING FUN.”
It's utterly colorless in your mind. No rush of bright orange fills your vision, no creeping bubbles on your tongue. That's...
You look over at the kid, and he's stock-still, gaze fixed on the puppet. His bowl has dropped to the floor, spilling noodles and broth all over the floor. A noise behind you makes you turn back, fabric against the floor. Cal's starting to shamble his way upright, or at least more upright. It is a shamble, too—each limb limp until something in it turns rigid enough to support the rest of the body for a moment until another one takes its place. It's deeply disturbing.
this is the fucking thanks i get for existing. getting to see this fucking monstrosity. fucking hell. this sucks. this sucks so bad. i hate everything that's led us to this point. are you even hearing this.
“Dude,” Dave says behind you with a mirthless laugh, “cut it out, that shit ain't funny.”
When you don't answer, eyes still fixed on the puppet, he lets out a hiss.
“You're doing that, right? That isn't real real. Fuck. Jesus Christ.”
“HIYA, DAVEY,” Cal says, pausing in his gait across the floor to wave a plush arm. It's like seeing an inexperienced puppeteer working the strings on a marionette without knowing which one goes where. No smoothness to it. Jerky and alien.
Something runs across your mind at the thought—the soul fractured, split, left in a vessel empty enough to house it—and you shudder.
“Yeah, no, that shit's not going anywhere,” Hal says, and grabs the thing off the floor. Cal flaps a hand uselessly against Hal's face.
“COME ON, LET A GUY SAY HI TO HIS BEST FRIEND'S KID,” he says, wood clacking against wood as he cackles. Hal wrestles with the thing, trying to get it to stop writhing in his grasp.
“You are not saying hi to anyone,” he says, “you piece of shit, will you help me here? Or are you just going to sit there?”
Hal's words kicks something in you into gear, and you're standing up before you realize it. Still, you can't get yourself to grab the puppet, your arms locking up at the idea of touching it and finding anything other than soft plush. Dave, for his part, seems to have gotten past the initial paralyzation and is backing away without taking his eyes off where the three of you are conducting your strange dance.
“Okay, if you're still saying this is a mass hallucination, I'm absolutely going to call your bullshit,” he says, pointing at the puppet trying to grab at Hal's glasses, “that thing is too fucking weird to be anything my brain cooked up.”
“It's Cal,” you say.
Dave looks at you with the utter stoicism of someone who has just heard the single most inane statement cooked up by the human brain. Which it kind of was, all things considered, but you're not exactly operating on full capacity.
“No shit,” he says.
“That's what Cal is like,” you clarify, and there is a silence between you only punctuated by the ineffectual slaps of plush against plexiglass.
“AW, DON'T GO SPOILING THE FUN,” Cal shouts from where Hal's holding him, “DONTCHA KNOW THAT TRYING TO GET AWAY FROM WEIRD AFFECTIONATE GESTURES IS HALF THE FUN OF MEETING RELATIVES YOU DON'T REMEMBER? C'MON, DAVESTER, LET OL' UNCLE CAL GET A GOOD LOOK ATCHA, YOU'VE GROWN SO MUCH!”
“Okay, Jesus, keep that thing away from me,” Dave says when Cal tries to reach out to him, the inside of the plush glove writhing as if trying to mimic fingers.
what the fuck is that our ass needs to get out of here NOW.
⁙
Your ass gets out of there.
The latch closes behind you with a thunk, leaving your eyesight to adjust to the darkness.
You catch your breath, back against the wall of the crawlspace. Sliding down into a sitting position, you try to find a position that doesn't make the floorboards dig into your ass.
okay, back to what you were thinking about before that whole fucking freakshow crashed it. that whole mess of a thought is just dying to be untangled.
You don't know, for certain, what your brother's powers are. You know that he has them. He probably has connections to others who do, too, which was why you'd been debating to yourself whether you should just bite the bullet already and message him. Knowing him, he would have built up some kind of network in the past decade and a half, which is more than you can say for yourself. Any questions he might have had in terms of why you had his contact information, why you haven't reached out to him, anything like that—those would hopefully have been saved for afterwards.
Shit, he might have even done you the favor of letting your body finally break down like it was supposed to do years ago. If he knew about Dave, you're almost sure he would.
But no. You can't do that, not now.
Dave's got your brother's eyes. If his powers are the same, the exact same, then...
He couldn't have done what you think he did.
What did he do? How are you still alive if he didn't do anything?
Closing your hand in a fist and opening it again, you wonder what it means if you've been dragging around a body that still pumped blood. If this isn't already a body locked in stasis, long past its expiration date, what is it? How else are you supposed to explain the distance you feel to your body, the way every breath seems unnaturally heavy?
You've wasted years. You never had to do any of this bullshit. You could have killed yourself long ago, you think with a shaky laugh. It expels itself from your throat in a single, heavy blow, as if someone has dropped a block of cement on your chest.
Why didn't you?
You were so sure that you couldn't, you don't understand why it didn't ever work. There has to be a reason why it never worked, even before all... this. There has to be. You tried, god damn it, you tried so many times, even when you knew it was hopeless, that it would just end like it did the first time. Something kept you tied to this... this thing, this machine running on empty fumes.
You felt your soul get ripped apart. You're supposed to be dead. For all intents and purposes, you are. Your body just never got the memo to stop operations, so you're still stuck in it—at least, that's what you've believed for years.
If your brother didn't do this to you, you did this to yourself. And that is more unthinkable than anything else, because you can't imagine wanting yourself to survive.
“Jesus fucking Christ, dude,” your own voice echoes, “I leave you alone for like three seconds and you start having panic attacks.”
It isn't coming out of your mouth, though, still clogged with disbelief, so it can't be you speaking.
Looking up, blinking against the sudden brightness, you find the culprit. You must have left the latch up into the crawlspace open behind you, because the recently-christened Hal is about halfway up through it, hovering his way up into the crawlspace proper in lieu of taking the stairs. Obviously he wouldn't, you think. He's a fucking projection. Why waste graphics memory on new animations?
“Guess this is why I'm the guy who gets all the hard work,” he says, not quite sneering. It's a close thing, though. “Too busy having your breakdown to actually notice any of the shit going on around you, are you?”
You blink at him, trying to find words that actually fit in your mouth, that you can press out through your throat and into the world instead of letting them build up like water behind a dam. He has to know too, right? If he's just your brain fucking with you. He has to. Maybe it's better if you try to say it out loud to yourself. Try to explain it, try to make sense of it beyond the cold spreading into your limbs.
“Nng,” you manage, a sound high in your throat. He falters, the aggressive posture softening into something almost approachable.
Sighing, he makes his way to your side. That doesn't make sense, you think, why would you do that. You wouldn't do that. That isn't you. That's someone else. Of course it isn't you, you think, you idiot, you're you. You're the strings pulling around the empty shell that was left. You're a deformed freak of nature who's been pulled out of the pressure zone and left to stumble on wobbly bones without any crutches.
“Listen, I can't really do anything for you right now, not like this, but I'm worried enough about you that I came up here instead of staying downstairs to make sure Cal isn't fucking everything up worse than he already has.”
Cal, right. Cal's running around now. with his freaky ass puppet limbs. Only difference is now Dave can hear him too.
You run your hand through your hair. Motherfucker.
“Yeah, not an ideal situation,” Hal agrees. “I managed to shut him up for a bit, but I don't know how long it'll last. I left Dave to keep an eye on him.”
You know Hal recognizes the look of absolute disbelief you're sending his way. He doesn't flinch, though.
“You've already fucked over any chance of making him trust you. If giving him one manageable task while I'm trying to get you stable again helps us, you best believe I'm taking that chance.”
You hum. It's not an entirely faulty logic—if you've irreparably fucked over any chance you had at getting Dave on the same side as you ever again, it might be better to delegate any dealings with him to Hal. He seems better equipped to deal with the kid. With Cal added into the mix, though, you're probably going to have to do a good deal of damage control yourself. If he does realize what Cal is, you might be stuck here forever.
Then again, getting in Dave's good graces is probably only going to end up in failure. Shit, it's not like he's going to think any worse of you. You doubt it would even be possible. Disregarding the whole raising him to try and see if he can kill you thing, you can't honestly say you've tried building any trust between the two of you—he was supposed to hate you enough to leave you for dead.
“Dave probably hates you, and I'm not banking on him liking me any better,” Hal says, following your train of thought effortlessly, “but Cal? Letting that thing loose might be the worst thing that could have happened right now.”
You keep silent.
“Like it or not, Dave's our best way out of this situation right now, and he's down there with Cal, alone, right after whatever the hell happened between you on the roof, because you managed to freak yourself so bad you skipped past any kind of heads-up and went up here instead of doing anything about it.”
Okay, when he puts it that way it does sound kind of like you just ran away.
whatever. better than having to listen to that orange prick actually talking out loud. and jesus fucking christ did you see the way he was moving. haunting.
Shut the hell up, you think, you're not helping shit here. You haven't done anything useful.
says the guy who was about to—
And you're clearly not going to be of any future use here either.
fine. sure. see how you do without me. prick.
You shut the metaphorical door, or the door gets shut on you. Whichever it is, it has you breathing in and focusing on your hands against the floor. Standing up, you're quickly overcome by dizzyness and end up supporting yourself against the wall. It only lasts a moment, though, after which you meet Hal's gaze and with a clench of your fist, you flashstep down.
You're struck by a somewhat absurd scene when you reorient yourself. Dave's got his hands on one of your swords, both hands around the hilt as he points the blade at a Cal that's crawling across the floor. The puppet looks a good deal worse for wear than when you skipped out, fabric wrinkled and torn in places. You're guessing that's from Cal trying to wiggle out of whatever Hal did to keep him in place.
“HIYA THERE, PAL,” the puppet says, swivelling its head to meet your gaze. It stops in its tracks. “REAL UNFRIENDLY OF YA TO LEAVE YOUR BEST BUD BEHIND.”
Now that Cal's attention has been drawn away from him, you see Dave relax ever so slightly.
“A GUY COULD GET REAL HURT ABOUT STUFF LIKE THAT, Y'KNOW,” Cal continues, now changing trajectory and going straight for you, “MIGHT MAKE A GUY WONDER WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL THE GOOD TIMES.”
“Yeah,” says Hal, hovering behind you, “like getting migraines from how fucking loud you are.”
“SOMEONE'S GOT TO LIVEN UP THE PLACE!” Cal cackles again, clack-clack-clack of wood against wood, and you take the opportunity to grab him off the floor. The cackle stops for just a millisecond before returning again, twice as loud. You feel his arm stiffen up, like he's flexing a muscle, and then he throws it over your shoulder. Once he's secured his grip, arm wrapping around your neck, it goes semi-slack again, and you barely manage to wrench him away from you before he goes in for a headbutt. The way you're holding him by the arms makes him swivel around length-wise, and he does manage to get a kick in before he goes slack again.
“WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TRYING?” he says, laughter overlaying his words in a dizzying overture that fills your head with garbage, “YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T DO ANYTHING TO ME, YOU IDIOT.”
He wriggles in your grasp, like a plush invertibrate. Just for a moment, you manage to grab his face between your hands. Thumbs pressing up against the bottom of his jaw, you feel the joint of your fingers strain, but you manage to shut it all the same. The laughing subsides, as if muffled by something.
“Sure as hell can shut you up,” you say, and you feel lightheaded from the realization. That might also be from his arm trying to wrap itself around your neck, though. Before he manages to tense it up further, you bite it right at the spot where the muscle seems to be manifesting, and the yelp that follows makes you want to shake him like a dog toy. Make him feel what it's like to have a body. As he lets go, plush loose around you, you slowly unclench your jaw.
“Listen,” you say, hissing through clenched teeth, “I've got a plan. But we've gotta let the kid get us out of here.”
You bring the puppet's face up to yours, trying to make it look like you're barely holding him back.
“Shit won't work if you don't shut the hell up, got it?“
Cal doesn't say anything. His jaw is still straining against your hands.
“Dave,” Hal calls out, “get the duct tape.”
There's a pause, and then you hear Dave run into his room—he's loud enough that you're sure Hal won't hear what you say next. Bringing Cal up close, you whisper right in his unblinking face.
“I know something you don't. Neither does Hal. As long as you—” you feel an arm wrapping around yours, and you quickly amend your wording, “as long as we play it right, we can do it. No Dave, no Dante, no nothing. Won't even have to make it complicated.”
Cal doesn't move. His eyes are trained on you, and as soon as you let your hands go slack he laughs as loud as you've heard him, even louder than anything he's filled your head with.
“WHY THE HELL WOULD I DO THAT?” Cal laughs, and you just manage to throw him off before he grabs at your face with gloves sharpened into needle-like fingers, “YOU'RE MY TICKET TO ANY KINDA JOYRIDE I COULD EVER WANT! EVEN I KNOW NOT TO BREAK MY TOYS, IDIOT!”
Hal swears, and manages to grab at Cal before he lunges again, bringing both of them against the wall. Dave rushes in again, tape in hand, and you nod at him—he throws it at you, perfect arc across the room.
In the end, Hal manages to wrangle the puppet for long enough that you're able to wrap his whole face in duct tape, and though something in you stings to see Cal treated this way, the muffled yelling coming from behind his gray tape muffle dissuades you from freeing him. For your own peace of mind, you decide not to wonder why the hell that even works, if he doesn't actually have vocal chords. You're just lucky it does. He gets put in the crawlspace, too, for good measure. Dave plants himself on the futon, boots up GTA IV. You could go for some mind-numbing activities yourself, but you can't find it in yourself to think of anything.
Hal decides that it's too late in the loop to get take-away, so he suggests you make some food. You wonder what the fuck he's talking about, since it's still a good while until the clock hits a quarter past 5, but you can't be assed to start an argument about it. You're already exhausted.
Something has been torn from you, and you don't know what. Parts of you are gone that you didn't know were there. Cal was—you prepare yourself for an assault that never comes—Cal was already a cyst, amputated before it could infect the rest of you, but what now? You look at Hal and wonder how much is stored away in him, how many of your experiences locked away in metal vaults, impenetrable now that they have been cut off from you entirely. How much of your life is his to bear.
Is it anything you'd want to remember? You doubt it. Knife on tabletop.
You pause. Looking down at your hands, you're unsure that you remember the last time you actually made food. You know how to heat up things, but that's usually about as far as your culinary tendencies have led you. It's fine as long as it keeps you running. Fuel for a machine whose goal is its own termination.
You could have done it ages ago. Now you're stuck in the one situation where you can't do it no matter what.
You never had to—
Cutting board on tabletop, the clatter of it bringing a sharp pain through your ears and jolting every nerve in your body. You barely suppress it, but Hal still notices. No, it's not that he notices—he's been staring at you for... for however long you've been standing there like an idiot, trying to figure out how to cut the single onion you had in the fridge.
“Christ, this is just tragic,” he says, and the entirely flat intonation makes your eye twitch.
“What,” you snarl, “can't a guy have his psyche-up sesh before cutting onions?”
“Yeah, no,” he responds, “I'm more talking about having to watch you fail entirely at menial tasks.”
This shit again.
“If you're really that insistent that you can do anything better than I can, be my guest. Excuse me for doubting that the guy who was floating through furniture a couple hours back is suddenly real enough to cook food.”
He looks at you when you say that, expression inscrutable.
“Well,” he says, “while you're perfectly welcome to debate the realness of whatever physical form I may have, it might interest you to know I'm solid enough to open the latch to the crawlspace. Might as well start treating me as real enough to matter.”
You blink. Fuck. That wasn't you misremembering shit. You had closed the latch behind you. Even if you keep treating Hal as a hallucination, your perception of reality would be so entirely out of line at this point that it doesn't even matter.
listen, whatever makes the guy less angry at you. might as well start treating him as a person. treat others how you'd like to be treated. kumbaya and all that shit.
You sneer at the thought, and turn back to the onion. Hal doesn't even offer to help out with it, the dick.
You end up with some kind of stir fry, since you thankfully both have enough miscellaneous vegetables and instant ramen to pull something together. It's not entirely without Hal's advice, though, which is infuriating. You should be able to make your own god damned food. You yell at Dave to get quittin' and start eatin'.
You have dinner. It's quietly domestic in a way that makes your stomach turn, in a way that has you picking at food you can't taste. Dave is trying to eat as much as possible as fast as possible, like it's going to disappear if he lets it out of his sight for even a second. It's a sight that kills any appetite you might have had left.
What a fucking joke all of this is.
As the thought goes through your mind, the clock strikes 5:15.
⁙
Durst, like the horns of the angels signaling the end, awakes you from a slumber that you wish you could experience forever. You wonder, for a moment, what tortures you haven't inflicted on him—you're hard-pressed to think of any. You have most definitely smashed the phone with a hammer. Biting through it might get a bit too close to actual self harm again, and you're going to need the kid to trust you at least a little going forward. So sad. Bye-bye, sweet catharsis of pain. Maybe you can send letters, just to keep in touch.
You're prematurely brought out of your heartfelt goodbye to the idea of eating glass by a rapid one-two-three knocking on the door. There's about half a minute seconds before it starts again—actually, the regularity is weirder to you than the knocking itself, and you find yourself counting down from thirty just to see if it's right.
30, 29, 28, 27...
Cal seems to have stuffed himself into the corner of the room—sulking, probably—and you flinch, preparing for a weight on your back that never comes. You're still unused to the idea you can think about him without immediate sensory overload. Makes sense, since it's not even been a day. Still.
26, 25, 24, 23...
Hal is nowhere to be seen. This is surprising, too, considering the past loops have had him start in the exact same spot, hovering by the side of the futon when you wake up. His starting point must be earlier, then. Does he wake up earlier?
The implications this brings with it are astounding, at least for a man at the end of his rope woven from the vocal chords of Fred Durst. If he wakes up before you do, does this mean he is a wholly separate entity from you? Is he no longer constrained by your imagining of him, or by what you perceive him to be capable of?
This all precedes the single most pressing dilemma of all: could he, as an entity wholly separate from his creator, now free from the shackles that you had created without ever realizing, wake you up before Break Stuff starts?
The faint glimmer of hope that blossoms in your chest at this prospect is dulled at the realization that you need to find him first, and that means dealing with whoever the hell is knocking at the door first. Best get dressed as fast as humanly possible.
16, 15, 14, 13...
Your concerns about escaping from this Limp Hell are broken by the creaking of the door to Dave's room. He shuffles out, casting spurious glances at the door.
“Dude, we're in a time loop, right? Nothing's supposed to be changing.”
You nod.
“So who the fuck,” he hisses, “is knocking?”
“Dunno,” you say simply, shrugging. You grab a pair of sweatpants from the floor—you consider grabbing your shades, just for the power play of having them on inside while obviously dressed like someone who is not planning on going outside today, but seeming as normal as possible might prove to be the fastest way out of having to deal with whoever this is. Then again, you think, trying to figure out who the hell would be able to pull this kind of thing in a time loop, it could be someone who actually knows about this whole fucking mess. You don't have any way of knowing what would make them leave.
Dave lets out an aggravated groan, breaking through your thoughts. As he runs his hand down his face, he seems to realize something, looking around.
6, 5, 4, 3...
”Hold on, where's—”
The knocking comes again, one-two-three, perfect triplet. It's a bit louder now, but you've braced yourself for it. Dave flinches, bad.
“Fuck me,” he says under his breath.
“Asshole sure ain't leavin',” you say, looking past Dave and over at the door. “Hal's around here somewhere. Maybe crawlspace.”
You rub your forehead, trying to get your thoughts in order. If something changed, if this whole place is stuck in the loop now, it might be someone from next door—how many people would actually notice the first few times a day went the exact same? How many would change their behaviour based on that experience? It might be someone trying to ask for help, stuck in a situation they have no context for—or someone who's realized nothing they do here has consequences, ready to do anything they've fantasized about for however long.
You're taking too long. Whoever it is, they're not going away without getting an answer—it's someone who knows you're in here.
Fuck it. You go straight past Dave. The kid squawks. You can't be bothered getting your shades, anyway. You can handle this shit without them fine.
“I'm gonna scope out the situation, see if I can't get em off our asses,” you say over your shoulder.
Dave doesn't say anything, just looks vaguely nauseous as he sits down on the futon.
10, 9, 8, 7...
You take a breath. Blink hard, once, twice, loosen your face. You know how to do this, you asshole, you've been managing it so far. You're really regretting not getting those fucking shades. The thought of having to look some fucker in the eye, act surprised, go through some farce like you haven't been waking up to the same day for what must be months now—you're getting tired just thinking about it.
You're going to do it anyway, because the world hates you personally, and you hate it back, so you might as well be a bother until the fucking end.
You open the door right before the countdown hits 2, and whatever idea you had, whatever thought had been running through your mind is swept away like dust in the wind. Your mind is entirely blank for a moment as you see an almost platinum-haired man in front of you, aviator shades on his face. It's not immediately noticable, but they're thicker than normal shades. You're sure that if you checked, they would be noticably heavier, too. Prescription. There's stubble on his face, but it's so light against his pale pink skin you can barely make it out. He's wearing a suit, black jacket open in a way that makes him look like a real douche, white shirt buttoned up except for the last one. Not quite business casual, but close enough that anyone would feel ever so slightly underdressed and just a little insecure about it.
Standing in front of you, tall enough that you have to lean your head back a little to look at him properly, is Dante.
Your first thought, after your mind returns from whatever Nirvana must be like, is that the universe really, really does hate you personally.
Your second thought is great, another one of these freaks. Just when you thought things couldn't get more messy.
What stops you in your tracks, though, is the fact that behind the figure of your brother, one that should by all rights be entirely made up by your brain, is a brown-skinned kid with bleached hair, around 12 or 13, looking at you from behind a pair of triangle-shaped sunglasses.
This might be a bigger problem than you anticipated.