The silence in the wrecked living room was absolute, profound, broken only by the faint hiss of escaping dust from the ravaged ceiling and the harsh, ragged sound of Ethan's own breathing. He remained slumped against the far wall, knees drawn up, unable to tear his gaze away from the grotesque scene on the sofa. Clara. The impossible angle of her head. The way the afternoon light, filtering through the dust-filled air and the jagged hole above, seemed to linger on the scene with an artist's impartial cruelty.
Nausea churned violently in his stomach, a physical reaction lagging behind the psychic trauma. He gagged, doubling over, but nothing came up. His system was too empty, too scoured out by the repeated cycles of shock and despair. He felt cold, despite the relative warmth of the late afternoon, a deep, internal chill that originated somewhere beyond the physical.
This time… this time felt different. Worse. The other deaths had been horrific, tragic, senseless. But this… this felt personal. Targeted. Maliciously ironic. He had passively wished for the fan to hit him, to offer him an escape, and instead, it had swerved, inches away, to perform a monstrously precise execution on Clara while she slept beside him, having likely returned early out of concern for him. It felt like the loop wasn't just killing her; it was actively twisting his own thoughts, his own despair, into the murder weapon. It was using his apathy against them both.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to banish the visual, but it was seared onto the back of his eyelids. He could almost feel the impossible weight of the fan falling, smell the plaster dust, hear the sickening finality of the impact. Was any of this real? Could reality truly contort itself into such grotesque shapes? Or was this, finally, the definitive proof that he had lost his mind? Was this entire nightmare playing out only within the collapsing architecture of his own sanity? Was Clara even real anymore, or just a recurring figment in his personal psychotic hell?
He opened his eyes again. The scene hadn't changed. The horror remained stubbornly, viscerally present. If this was madness, it was horrifyingly detailed, relentlessly consistent in its core rule: Clara dies.
The minutes ticked by. Or maybe hours. Time felt viscous, irrelevant. He remained huddled against the wall, adrift in the wreckage of his life. The crushing weight of the repetitive grief pressed down on him, heavier than the fallen ceiling plaster. It wasn't the sharp, stabbing pain of initial loss anymore; that had been ground down by recurrence. Now, it was a vast, suffocating pressure, the accumulated weight of twelve remembered deaths, twelve failed rescues, twelve solitary journeys through the hours after her passing.
He was so utterly alone. Trapped in this knowledge, this cycle, unable to share it, unable to explain it without sounding insane. Clara experienced only one terrifying day (or part of one), while he carried the burden of all of them. The isolation was a physical ache, a void carved out inside him that echoed with the screams he couldn't utter, the warnings he couldn't make stick.
He thought back over the loops, a slideshow of horrors playing in his mind. The car. The allergy. The stairs. The branch. The bullet. The fire. The knife. The train. Was there a pattern? A logic? Or was it pure, malevolent chaos, designed solely to break him? He searched for clues, for weaknesses in the structure of the loop, finding only the immovable constant of 5:17 PM and Clara's death.
Why? The question hammered at him, voiceless but deafening. Why was this happening? Was it punishment? Had he done something terrible, forgotten or unknown, to deserve this unending torment? Was some cosmic entity exacting revenge? Was it God? Or was God indifferent, or absent altogether? Or was it simpler, more terrifying – just random, meaningless cosmic static, a glitch in the fabric of spacetime that had ensnared them without reason or purpose?
The sheer unfairness of it began to curdle the numb despair within him. Not just unfair to him, but monstrously unfair to Clara. She died, again and again, in myriad brutal or bizarre ways. She faced her end sometimes in terror, sometimes in confusion, sometimes with no warning at all. And she never knew why. She never remembered. She woke each loop into the same ordinary morning, filled with plans and anxieties that would never matter, walking unknowingly towards an execution she couldn't comprehend or avoid. She was a pawn in a game she didn't even know she was playing.
He looked across the room at her still form, partially obscured by the wrecked fan. She didn't deserve this. Whatever force was behind this, whatever cruel intelligence or blind mechanism, its focus on her felt obscene. Why her? Why keep subjecting her to this?
Could he end it? The thought surfaced again, clearer this time, colder. If he couldn't save her, could he at least stop the loop itself? Could he find his own exit? If he were to succeed in killing himself – truly, definitively – before the reset, would it break the cycle? Would she wake up tomorrow to a normal day, grieving him perhaps, but free from this recurring nightmare?
He pushed himself slowly to his feet, ignoring the aches and bruises from the glancing blow of the fan. He surveyed the wrecked apartment. Was there a way? Pills? A fall from the window? The knife. His mind briefly, clinically, assessed methods. But even as the thoughts formed, the crushing futility settled back in. The reset. Midnight. It wasn't just a temporal rewind; it felt like a fundamental reset of condition. Wounds vanished. Intoxicants were purged. Would death itself be any different? Would he simply find himself gasping awake back in bed, the memory of his own demise added to the gruesome collection? Suicide wasn't an escape strategy; it was likely just another dead end, another variable the loop would effortlessly negate. There was no way out for him, not even through oblivion.
He was trapped. Completely, utterly trapped. Powerless to save Clara, powerless to escape himself, powerless even to understand the rules of his prison.
And as he stood there, amidst the dust and debris, staring at the violation on the sofa, something shifted within him. The numbness began to recede, not replaced by the familiar cold despair, but by something else. Something hot. Something sharp.
Rage.
A slow-burning ember at first, deep in his chest, kindled by the sheer, unrelenting injustice. It wasn't just sadness anymore. It was fury. Fury at the force, entity, or cosmic accident responsible for this torment. Fury at the inescapable clock, ticking down to 5:17 PM day after day. Fury at the world for spinning on, oblivious, while he and Clara were trapped in this private hell. Fury at his own helplessness, his own repeated failures. But most of all, white-hot, righteous fury for what was being done to Clara.
She was innocent. She deserved none of this. She deserved her wedding, her career, her ordinary, happy life. And this… this thing… kept snatching it away, killing her with casual, inventive cruelty, using him as a tormented witness, even twisting his actions and emotions against them both.
The apathy vanished, burned away by the rising heat of anger. The exhaustion remained, but it was now overlaid with a dangerous, brittle energy. He wasn't just a victim anymore. He was someone with a grievance. A profound, infinitely repeating grievance.
He looked again at the scene on the sofa, not with horror or despair now, but with hardening resolve. Fine. If he couldn't save her, if he couldn't escape, if the universe insisted on playing this cruel game… maybe it was time to stop playing by its rules. Maybe it was time to fight back, not with futile attempts at rescue, but with something else. Something that matched the loop's own malice.
He didn't know what that meant yet. Didn't know how. But as he stood there, waiting for the clock on his phone to tick closer to midnight, the feeling solidified. The despair hadn't vanished, but it now had company. Rage. Cold, hard, and deep. The universe had picked a fight. And though he had no weapons, no strategy, no hope of winning, the thought of simply enduring passively was no longer tolerable. Tomorrow wouldn't be about saving Clara, or finding peace, or understanding why. Tomorrow, Loop Thirteen, would be about anger.