Arthur didn't sleep that night.
Not because he was afraid of waking up in the loop again—but because he wasn't sure what to do with a future.
For the first time in… he didn't even know how long, he had no script to follow. No familiar beats, no inevitable tragedy waiting on the horizon. Just silence. Just possibility.
His parents went to bed like it was any normal night. Like it wasn't a miracle.
He sat on the porch, watching the rain mist down from the October sky, letting the cold bite into him. He wanted to feel it all—the damp, the chill, the hollow hum of the quiet street. Proof that this was real. That he wasn't trapped anymore.
He kept checking the time.
11:58 PM.
In the loops, he never made it past midnight. That was always the cutoff. The loop would end, the reset would come, and October 23rd would stretch out before him again like a curse carved in stone.
11:59 PM.
He stared at the second hand of his watch.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
12:00 AM.
Nothing happened.
No shift. No gut-wrenching pull backward in time.
It was October 25th.
He laughed—soft at first, then louder, until it broke into something almost hysterical. He clapped a hand over his mouth, not wanting to wake anyone, tears stinging his eyes again. He had forgotten what it felt like to move forward.
The next morning, sunlight cut through the blinds.
Sunlight. Not the dull, unchanging grey he had grown so used to. This was a softer light. Warmer. New.
His parents were at the kitchen table, bickering good-naturedly over what to make for breakfast. It was the kind of moment that, before, he would've taken for granted. Now, it felt sacred.
He sat down at the table. Just sat there, soaking it in.
"Morning, sleepyhead," his mom teased. "You look like you ran a marathon in your dreams."
"Something like that," he murmured.
His dad handed him a coffee. "You alright, son? You seemed… off yesterday."
Arthur hesitated.
What could he say? That he'd lived that day a thousand times? That he'd watched them die in every imaginable way? That he'd tried to stop it over and over again, and somehow finally succeeded?
"I'm just… glad you're here," he said instead.
His father smiled, confused but warmed. "Well, we're not planning on going anywhere."
That was all Arthur needed to hear.
But even as he smiled, a thought crept into the back of his mind. A darker one.
The loop was broken.
But why had it existed in the first place?
Was it a glitch? A punishment? A test?
Was there something—or someone—behind it?
And now that it was over…
Was he really free?
Later that day, Arthur walked to the small local library. Not to do research. Not to chase ghosts.
He just… needed to be alone with his thoughts.
He wandered the aisles, fingers trailing along book spines, until he stopped in the nonfiction section. There, among books on time, memory, and neuroscience, he paused.
A title caught his eye:
"The Temporal Mind: Perception, Time, and the Brain."
He pulled it down and flipped through the pages absently, but his thoughts were far away.
If time could break for him… could it break again?
What if someone else was caught in a loop, right now? What if the universe had more fractures than anyone realized?
He closed the book.
Outside, the wind was picking up. Leaves tumbled past the windows, golden and brittle.
And deep inside, a new kind of resolve began to form.
The story wasn't over.
It had only just shifted directions.