#a character whose stuck in a timeloop

[thebestusernamepossible]

Really interesting phenomena in some fandoms where they will throw out ‘non canon’ stuff in an attempt get back to source material, ignoring the source of the ‘headcanon’.

Things like ‘Sans has 1HP’, sometimes get thrown out and labelled as fanon. When the REASON it’s a headcanon is because in the files of the game he has 1HP. (And because it fits his general thing (tm), it’s adds to the trolling).

Im using Undertale as an example but it happens elsewhere.

This is like a sibling of the ‘tries so hard to not be the common fanon version they roll back to an equally fanon logical opposite of that’

Not complaining really, I just think the way fandoms do things and how characters distort is really interesting.

[anthenasikes]

Who is myles I want to know everything about him

THERES LIKE THREE DRAWINGS OF HIM IN THE MYLES TAG he also has a playlist somewhere which i can find if you want.

hes an ocs hes been in my brain since 2020 ? i cant do a full rant right now but like summary of him now all of the problems revolve around him but also a lot of those problems are because of him too hes definitely the kind of character thats like ME AND ONLY ME IM GOING TO FIX EVERYTHING but he kind of started a lot of these problems in the first place. and isnt aware of it. he is also an asshole. he is aware of that.

its funny bc when i first made him i just needed a random bg character so one of my other guys could have a twin and he was this random guy. with nothing about him and he was supposed to be cis and also probably be into jesse ANYYYYWAYYYSY as he is right now he hates jesse and jesse hates him and theyre both aromantic so LMAO also at some point he ended up being the Protagonist . fuck jesse ig?? no more protag rights for you. i didnt do this on purpose it just ended up that way ?????

yanno how i was talking about song's sort of white boy cousin. name is darryl. well myles and his twin (whose name is Tobi (or tobias))were like partially raised by darryl and his gfs who are carr(issa) and jolie bc carr's family friends with their family etc etc but uhhh TLDR those three were great older sibling figures but also maybe not bc they may have been generally responsible for a while but they are so emotionally messy i dont know how they were doing college things and also watching over some stupid middle schoolers. but carr does lose her shit later on about something not myles related and i think that has a big impact on myles losing his shit! darryls probably turning into plants or somethign but like whatever. who cares. darryl voice "myles there are flowers growing through my fingernails i cannot move my hand. this is an emergency bc i cant do my eyeliner. can you do my eyeliner please please" myles voice "i hate this house." he didnt ask carr to do his eyeliner bc carr is passed out with her face in a bowl of cheerios. also in the timeline where plants are a thing jolies probablty dead idk i have 1700000 versions of this world sometimes there are plants and death and sometimes its like a sitcom im ranting now help me jesus

whatever 'present' time is myles is prolly a high school sophomore or smth. hes mostly friends with song's cousin who is avery.

i have seventeen thousand different versions of what i like to call the song-and-jesse-universes so its hard to tell you one specific Plot thing or anything coherent about myles actual story shit but trust me. putting him in a timeloop actually makes total sense for the primary version of the story i was thinking about so im probbaly actually going to do that. it makes sense. it makes a lot of sense. SHIT anyways hes a pissbaby but he can be nice if he wants but not to jesse him and jesse are stuck in the same friend group but i think jesse is going to kill him in an un-fun and actually angry way someday. wahoo!1!! im not proofreading this before i post it. have a great reading-ant's-rant time <3

[darnestdungeon]

My DD zine bundle arrived last week!! Everything was SO beautiful, not only on the zine itself but also the extras, from the digital wallpapers to the little stickers, good job everyone, good job @ddfanzine <3

(Some fic recs and other random stuff under read more!)

So I have just finished reading all the fanfics, kudos to all of them too!! The ones who stuck in my mind were (in no particular order):

"How to woo a holy man" by MnM_ov_doom (tardif following dismas's advice to approach damian, so funny and endearing)

"Ballads of the Lost Souls" by Leenu_Heath (a different type of poem for each hero, so creative!)

"Trinkets" by asimawv (loved the timeloop premise and that. ENDING. </3)

"Puppet Master" by Carpe_Natem (a tragic closer look on the Butcher's Circus Ringmaster and her decaying state of mind)

"Heaven of stone" by wyrd_eater (delicious pain and torture like only she knows how to do it)

I won't say much else to not spoil those who haven't read it yet, but do yourself a favor and pick it up to read it if you haven't already!

Also, if I have to choose one(1) favorite thing from the bundle, it will have to be the little maid jester sticker. It is so tiny and adorable, I mean, look at it!! I can never stick it. Nice job @aloetech!

[Also, totally unrelated to the DD or the zine, but if you want to, do pay attention to the books I used as a stand for the zine, I totally recommend them as well!]

The blue book is "Roadside Picnic" ("Piquenique na Estrada" in Portuguese), a Russian sci-fi novel about a setting in which aliens briefly visited the Earth but left without interacting with humanity, and the story of the book is centered around a stalker-- a man whose job is to go into the zones the aliens visited to grab and sell the odd artifacts they have left behind. (This book inspired the STALKER game series, if that sounded familiar!)

The pile behind the zine are all the volumes of "Dungeon Meshi" (or "Delicious in Dungeon"), a fantasy/comedy manga in which in order to survive and descend the dungeon to obtain their goals, the party must make delicious meals out of the dungeon monsters like walking mushrooms, slimes and even dragons. It is SO creative and funny, with such great world building and solid characters!!

(Do let me know if you follow any of these recommendations, so I can level up my 'trusted recs' badge or whatever.)

[measuringbliss]

Thank you @thekidkelly 💜

always impressed when people consider me important enough to mention me hahaha

So this is 10 characters 10 tags 10 fandoms

I'll forgo the tags, if you see this you can do it

There's no particular order

1 Blaine Anderson (Glee; I actually kind of have a love/hate relationship with him because I loved him for most of the show but I got tired of him by the end. But after 1 month without watching the show... I miss him)

2 Charlie Kelly (IASIP; I think if you follow me, you have an idea of who he is)

3 Hernando Fuentes (Sense8; what can I say, he's the perfect husband)

4 Temperance Brennan (Bones; probably autistic and when I say "probably" I mean "afaik it's not stated outright in the show but she's OBVIOUSLY ND AF)

5 Bedelia Du Maurier (Hannibal; she's the definition of "I'm not paid enough for this shit" except that she totally is. Actually Hannibal pays her so he'll talk about Will, and Will later pays her just so he can be a bitch to her. She's iconic. Also the embodiment of "curiosity killed the cat")

6 Dirk Gently (DGHDA; I mean COME ON. I don't think I've ever seen such a close representation of myself on screen.)

7 Tree Gelbman (Happy Deathday; stuck in a timeloop and getting more and more angry at the world? Relatable, cathartic, iconic)

8 Edelgard von Hresvelg (FE3H; she's determined to change the world for the better, even if that means starting a war; playing the Church like a fiddle? Check. Bisexual lady who wields axes? Check. What's not to love?)

9 Joy Wang (EEAAO; lesbian girl with ADHD and an incredible fashion sense whose depression was so great she became omnipotent. We stan)

10 Joseph Nolastname (Scott Pilgrim; bearded gay dude who hates everyone else and shittalks them but surprisingly kisses Stephen Stills in one of the last panels of the series, we love that for him, Stephen went from straight to "hm. hmm. hm!")

[catgirlkirigiri]

sans essay sans essay sans essay

@hawstar also asked for this so here it is!

To start off I’m going to copy paste a text I sent to my sibling earlier; Sans is so fucking tragic I hate how he became a meme among both the ut fandom and the rest of the Internet because he's such a relatable character (to me at least) that it's scary. Every aspect of him is so clearly carefully thought out with what he knows and the fact that he does and I'm going to cut myself off before I write an essay

And now we aren’t cutting ourself off. Full ramble below the cut. I focus on the aspect of resets and the nihilism they cause for Sans in this post, so warning for that kind of talk.

Sans is a character who, at a glance, is just a lazy comedian. But the further you look, the more there is to him. One important aspect of sans’s demeanor is the fact that he can remember previous timelines. He knows every time you’ve played through the game, and he remembers it. He’s stuck in a timeloop with no hope of freedom. For many players, this means he’ll get a happy ending and be freed of the loop. For even more of them, though… he isn’t so lucky. And these are our focus.

Sans’s laziness comes from a place of existential nihilism. To him, there’s no point in putting forth effort, because it’ll all be reset anyway. When you’ve been put through loop after loop after loop, it’s easy to lose any drive because everything is truly pointless for him. There is quite literally nothing to motivate him. Flowey, the other one who knows of the loops, uses every reset as a playground. Hell, he was in control of the timeline for a long period. He’s played with their fates and done whatever the fuck he’s wanted to with the underground for years while Sans had to watch it all happen, powerless to stop an entity whose death only resets the world.

For someone who doesn’t care, he cares a lot for the people in his life, as is shown frequently. He cares deeply for his brother, which if you somehow missed I’m shocked. He cares about monster kind enough to work as a sentry in the royal guard and enough to be tempted to claim the seventh human soul for them, and he cares about Toriel enough to keep Frisk safe. It can be argued through analyzing his fight dialogue that he cares enough about Gaster to remember him, despite the whole world forgetting, but we aren’t here for a Gaster rant. Yet the one thing he cannot care about is the world. Why is that? It’s simple.

The world goes away. The people in it don’t.

Until they do.

A genocide run tells so much more about Sans than people acknowledge. People would much rather fawn over Megalovania or cry after dying on their 276th attempt through his fight then acknowledge the pain he admits to in his fight dialogue. Sans admits that in this fight he “can’t afford not to care anymore,” acknowledging his lack of motivation in a resettable world, and he explains it here. He tells us that they have seen the anomaly of a reset, seen timelines “jumping left and right, stopping and starting…” The futility of living in such a world and being burdened with knowing of it would fuck with anyone. He can’t even have the comfort of someone else knowing of their personal hell because the only others aware of it are a homicidal flower who has previously had control over the timeline and the silent human that causes these resets.

He tells us that we “can’t understand how this feels,” and he’s right. The things that shaped Sans into the depressed nihilist he is don’t apply to our world. They can only be understood through the lense of someone who’s lived a thousand times, every life restarted because someone else wasn’t satisfied. He doesn’t care to reach the surface because he knows it would just get reset again. He stopped trying to go back because there’s no point. In his own words, nothing matters to him anymore, “cause even if we do... we'll just end up right back here, without any memory of it, right?”

And that’s just focusing on one aspect of him. I could go on about him more if you guys ask again but I’m lazy, so this is all you’re getting today.

[transguygardner]

like learning that tim only got to come out because of some higher ups not paying attention even though his whole relationship with kon is like that was so disappointing. and he’s the only superhero i can think of thats gotten to come out lately whose had over ten years of character history. like there’s a good amount of new(er) characters who’ve gotten to come out. even some higher profile ones (jon) and sigrid got to return after decades of being marked as dead and they got to come back with a new gender! but the team sigrid is attached to (which is FULL of lgbt characters) doesn’t even have a book or even a backup story or a digital only. instead they had a potential book idea put in a round robin competition up against the robins book in the first round… basically ensuring that they would lose.

and then there’s the decision to focus on alan scott over his son todd rice even though the most interesting thing about alan has always been his kids. and even then neither of them are really in anything. and like ok we have natasha, apollo, midnighter, and the new omac on the authority but like thats not even the main universe versions of them. not to mention midnighter’s last story involving him being stuck in a timeloop that required him to kill himself. which like yeah that fits the general tone midnighter’s stuff usually gets but if midnighter and constantine are the only preestablished heroes (a term used loosely for both of them) that get to consistently show up in stuff thats so damn bleak.

im just so tired of the only lgbt characters who get to show up JUST being either 1) new characters 2) cops and other government agents 3) worst “hero” youve ever met or 4) another goddamn batman villain

[rorykillmore]

okay and THIS one is for @larkspear  who requested any kind of au involving laurel and dolores. this fic is a funny story in and of itself. i spent a little while wondering what to do, weighing more traditional options, and then one day i was like “you know what? these two deserve a romcom au”. so i picked the most winter-y romcom i could think of - groundhog day - and the concept kind of ran away with me. it required a... lengthier execution by its very nature and actually became the longest gift fic i’ve written. so... either sorry, or you’re welcome?? i had such a blast with this, though i went back and forth on whose perspective i wanted to write it from and ultimately decided laurel lent herself better to “being super grumpy about smalltown life” in spite of dolores’ canonical history with timeloops so. all of this to say writing a long fic from someone else’s character’s perspective is daunting and i hope it turned out okay!

spear, i hope this fic is deserving of all the effort and development we’ve poured into this ship. i’m really grateful that 2018 gave us so many great opportunities to rp and plot with each other because every moment of it has been fantastic, and i’m also just really glad to have you in my life as one of my closest friends!! you’re always one of the first to salt with me if i’m grumpy, or reach out and offer something nice if i’m upset. thank you for being such a great friend, for all the rps i still hold close to my heart, and for entertaining all of us with memestream from week to week!!

Hey, Sara, funny you should call. I think I’m losing my mind -- any idea what to do about being stuck in a timeloop?’

Not that Laurel didn’t appreciate a good dose of AC/DC - who in their right mind didn’t? - but she has to admit that in practice, waking up to Highway to Hell is a lot less funny than she’d thought it was going to be last night.

Even if it is still utterly appropriate for the day ahead of her.

She grumbles almost inaudibly against the obnoxiously loud musical backdrop and reaches blindly for her phone -- still half asleep, so it takes her a little bit of fumbling to actually turn off the alarm. Sitting up in bed feels like a monumental task by itself, especially when she realizes that her hotel room is cold.

Like, ice cold.

“Place doesn’t even have a goddamn heating system that works,” she mutters to herself, smoothing her hair out of her face. She’s not sure what else she expected from this stupid, cutesy, outdated bed-and-breakfast -- the only place in Beacon Heights with vacancies, as if fucking Groundhog Day is a pull-out-all-the-stops holiday around here, or something.

The sooner she gets to work, she tells herself, the sooner this day will be over with, and the sooner she can go home. She slips out of bed and goes to get showered and dressed, delayed only slightly by the inconvenience of being held up by the nosy, overly friendly teenage desk clerk downstairs (some weirdo named Ratchet, or at least, that’s what he tells everyone to call him. Laurel’s pretty sure that’s not a real thing anyone would be named).

“Morning!” ‘Ratchet’ calls to her cheerfully on cue. “We have fresh coffee made, if you wanted any --”

“No thanks,” Laurel cuts him off without even looking at him. She’s out the door before he can get another word out.

In the car, she finally takes a second to check her phone.  Just one missed call, but when she scrolls down to see the contact info, she feels herself stiffen in the drivers seat.

Sara.

Why the hell would her sister be calling her? They haven’t spoken in almost two months.

She stares at the screen for a few more seconds, deliberating. There’s a nagging possibility that won’t leave the back of her mind, that maybe Sara just wants to talk, to work things out, but -- 

-- Then that stinging fear of rejection catches up with her. Reconciliation is probably overly optimistic, in light of everything. She’s going to be late for work anyway.

She puts her phone down and tries not to think about it.

The drive into town is, in theory, only five minutes, since Beacon Heights is so insufferably cozy. But ‘five minutes’ today is translating to ten, and then fifteen because of all the traffic, and God, what is it with people in this town and this holiday? What was it about twitchy rodents predicting the weather that got people up out of their beds at 6:30 in the morning?

Small towns were so weird.

When the line of cars in front of her finally start to move, Laurel is about at her wits’ end -- almost crazed and impatient enough not to stop when some freak on a motorcycle has the nerve to try cut in front of her. As it is, he hits a patch of ice and skids haphazardly anyway, making an outright spectacle when he’s finally thrown from the back of his vehicle by the sudden stop and flies straight into a snowbank on the side of the road.

Laurel eyes him for a moment. But the road in front of her is open.  “Serves you right,” she mutters under her breath, and hits the gas without stepping to check to see if he’s okay.

She gets to work almost ten minutes late, as it is. Her director and cameraman - Camille and Felix, respectively, the only two people she can even vaguely count as friends despite how many years she’s had this job - look vaguely exasperated when she finally walks into what passes for Beacon Heights’ news broadcast studio.

“Traffic,” she tells them defensively.

“You’d better tell hair and make-up to make it fast.” Camille eyes her up and down a bit judgmentally. “We’re supposed to be outside and live in forty minutes.”

“Which is exactly why I don’t need hair and make-up,” Laurel, who can’t see the point of even trying to look good when bundled up in twenty degree weather, grumbles.

From there on out, the morning (relatively, for the most part) goes as planned. Filming outside in this kind of weather is insufferable - and the fact that all the cheery townspeople who have gathered to watch don’t seem to have their moods dented by this at all even moreso - but Laurel has been doing her job long enough by now to know how to keep a smile plastered on her face.

It’s a sunny day, so predictably, the groundhog sees his shadow. Everyone acts surprised anyway, and coos and fawns over the damn thing. Laurel tries not to gag.

“Now that that’s over,” she tells Camille under her breath when they’re done filming. “I’m getting coffee. Or maybe something stronger.”

As it turns out, it’s difficult to find anyone willing to serve anything stronger at this hour of the morning in Beacon Heights, so. Coffee it is. Laurel orders a cup to go from the local diner, and she’s on her way out, admittedly in a little bit of a hurry,  when she knocks right into someone.

The disastrous results seem to play out in slow motion. She stumbles. Her coffee cup flies into the air, the lid jarred loose by its velocity. And warm (not steaming, which is probably good) liquid spills all over the woman Laurel just ran into.

She’s pretty, is the first weird thought Laurel has.

(Okay, not that weird, one night stands are not exactly an oddity for her when she’s traveling on a job, but maybe it’s a little weird when you’ve just accidentally covered someone in warm coffee).

Almost out-of-a-storybook pretty, with long blonde hair that she wears in soft curls and bright blue eyes and a matching, expensive looking coat that is now...

...unfortunately, pretty much ruined.

“Wow,” Laurel says unhelpfully in place of an apology.

The other woman gapes at her for a moment longer, and then suddenly seems to shake herself out of it.  “Have you ever tried watching where you’re going?”

Later, she’ll probably look back and decide instigating any further was a bad idea, but right now the hostility in the woman’s tone provokes in Laurel something close to insolence. “Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to know this town?”

The woman bristles at her. “You’re not exactly as charming face-to-face as you are on screen, are you?”

“Depends on who you ask.” She probably sounds like an asshole, mostly because she can’t keep from sounding a little amused. “Today’s probably not one of my finer moments.”

“Well. Because of you, I can either not make my job interview this morning, or show up looking like this. So thanks.”

Laurel shrugs, though she’s starting to feel she’s on the edge of... if not guilty, then at least vaguely self-conscious. Which means, of course, another bout of defensiveness.  “It’s Beacon Heights. Everyone else looks worse than you do now on their best days.”

It’s the wrong thing to say, evidently. The woman shoulders past her angrily and starts to stalk off, and to make things even worse, the man coming up the road from the opposite direction pauses to acknowledge her.  “Everything okay, Dolores?”

Laurel realizes with an unpleasant lurch that she recognizes him: the man she knocked off the motorcycle earlier this morning. She turns quickly before he can notice her and opts to hurry back to her car instead of getting another cup of coffee. Too much risk of running into one of them inside the cafe.

God, everyone knows everyone in this town. It’s insufferable.

At the very least, she’s pretty sure her day can’t get much worse. Until she makes it back to the inn to change her clothes, and finds Ratchet, still waiting for her at the front desk.

She glares at him in passing, daring him to say anything. And of course, he addresses her obliviously anyway.  “You got water? Supplies? Everything you need for tonight and tomorrow?”

That makes Laurel halt in her tracks.  “...What are you talking about?” she asks, turning to face him suspiciously.

Ratchet blinks at her.  “There’s a big storm coming. Weren’t you covering the weather this morning?”

“All we talked about was the goddamn groundhog,” Laurel grits out. “What storm?”

“Big blizzard.” Ratchet shrugs somberly.  “Worst we’ve had this year. Not supposed to clear up ‘til... uh, sometime tomorrow evening, I think?”

Laurel feels her heart sinking rapidly.  “But I’ll still be able to get out of here tomorrow, right?”

“Drive out of here?”  Ratchet sounds mildly incredulous.  “I wouldn’t. And believe me, I’ve pulled off some pretty crazy --”

She doesn’t wait for him to finish his anecdote. All she can think about now is being stuck in this miserable town for another day and a half, and how nothing so far has gone right, and that if one more person tries to make ‘small talk’ with her she’s going to snap.

She storms up to her room without another word. It’ll be hours still before it even gets dark, but right now, she doesn’t feel like doing much more than sulking and counting down the time until she can sleep some of this off.

Living easy, living free Season ticket on a one-way ride Asking nothing, leave me be Taking everything in my stride...

Purely on instinct this time, Laurel reaches for her phone and silences it quickly, then lifts her head from the pillow to glare at it. She could have sworn she’d changed that alarm to something less grating.

She tries not to dwell on it, getting up out of bed and instead moving to the window to gauge the damage of the night before. Maybe it won’t be as bad as the desk clerk said --

-- There’s only a thin layer of snow on the ground. Same as yesterday.  

Laurel can hardly believe her luck. Are the people in this town insufferable and hysterical?

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise her that they can’t even get the weather right. Not keen on wasting any time just in case, she hurries to pack her things, and God, the room is still so cold even though she told them to fix the heat yesterday --

Whatever. She showers quickly, throws herself together even more haphazardly than yesterday, and hurries downstairs once all her things are packed.

“Morning!” By now she recognizes Ratchet’s grating voice.  “We have fresh coffee made, if you wanted any -- hey, uh, where are you going with all that stuff?”

“Relax,” she mutters, begrudgingly approaching the front desk. “I’m checking out. Since the storm blew over.”

Frustratingly, Ratchet only stares at her for a moment.  “The storm’s not... due until tonight,” he answers slowly, and before Laurel can berate him for the misinformation, he adds, “Don’t you have a thing today, anyway?”

Laurel stares back blankly.  “A ‘thing’?”

“I thought you were in town with your crew to cover the Groundhog Day celebration.”

Is he screwing with her? Or just trying to hold her up? She sets her phone on the counter pointedly.  “Groundhog Day was yesterday.”

But then her screen lights up, and she sees she has a missed call. From Sara.

Panic seizes her for a moment - why would Sara call twice in two days, is there some kind of emergency, did something happen to Dad - and then she notices the date on her phone. And her blood runs cold for an entirely different reason.

Had yesterday just been some kind of fever dream? Was she losing her mind?

“Shit,” Laurel mutters under her breath.  “Shit shit shit shit shit.” Forgoing any explanation, she grabs her phone, turns, and makes a beeline for the door empty-handed.

“Miss Lance, what about your luggage --” Ratchet starts to call after her, but Laurel waves him off.

“Get someone to take it up to my room for me; I’ll tip them later!” If she doesn’t haul ass, she’s going to be late.  Like, later-than-yesterday late. How the hell could this have happened? How could she have thought today -- was tomorrow?

All her hurrying ends up being mostly for nothing -- if there’s one thing her dream (or whatever it was) predicted, it was the traffic. And... the call from Sara, now that she thinks about it. And the alarm.

Something weird feels like it’s creeping up on her, and she almost stops paying attention to the road -- long enough not to realize that someone is trying to cut in front of her. The vehicle - a motorcycle, she knows without even looking at it - swerves badly and skids to an abrupt stop at the side of the road, sending its rider flying into a snowbank.

Unwittingly, Laurel slows enough to get a good look at him -- the guy from before, the one who’d been there when she’d spilled coffee all over... Dolores?  How could she have dreamed his face if she’d never seen him before?

He starts to pick himself up, and she snaps out of it, speeding off before he can get a word out.

By the time she gets to work, she’s at least trying to laugh it all off -- content to chalk it all up to a weird case of deja vu, or something, because what else makes sense. It might have worked out, too.

If Camille and Felix hadn’t greeted her with the exact same skepticism.

If she hadn’t had her hair and make-up done in the exact same way, then sent outside to the exact same filming location.

If the groundhog hadn’t seen his goddamn shadow.

Laurel is barely holding it together by the time she gets off work. It’s really the best she can do just to seem like she’s not panicking, and when she goes to the coffee shop -- dreading what she’ll find -- it’s more to prove a completely implausible hunch than anything. Or maybe to disprove it. Like if she can avoid spilling coffee all over that woman, this... spell, or whatever it is, will break.

She inches out the door, coffee held tightly in one hand -- but she’s so intent on squeezing past Dolores that her foot hits the upturned side of the coffee shop’s cheery welcome mat, and she stumbles, and it’s enough to send coffee splattering all over Dolores.

Again.

Laurel can do nothing but sort of gape at her even as she’s met with that same angry, incredulous stare. 

“Have you ever tried watching where you’re going?” Dolores demands, and Laurel almost wants to cry.

I think I’m going crazy.

“I think I’m going crazy.”

No, wait -- she’d actually said it aloud. 

Dolores does a kind of double-take. “...Excuse me?”

“I’m --”  Laurel can’t keep her voice from wavering.  “You don’t remember?”

“Remember you?” Dolores seems caught somewhere between uncertain and disdainful.  “I’ve seen you on TV. And I knew you were in town, of course, for the holiday broadcast I’m sure you think is beneath you. People can hear you when you make fun of them, you know, and news travels fast --”

“No, no, no, remember this -- this -- all of this!”  In her panic, Laurel gestures to an increasingly baffled looking Dolores.  “The coffee, the -- the argument, the --”

Dolores only stares at her unhelpfully.  “...Are you alright?”

Laurel can only laugh, which she’s sure makes her sound at least vaguely unhinged. But it’s clear by this point that neither Dolores nor anyone else in this town has any idea what she’s talking about. Reality setting in has a strangely calming effect on her.  “No. -- Yes. I’m just having a... really weird day.”

Maybe she’s imagining that Dolores’ expression softens just slightly - not that it really matters, she wouldn’t even know how to take sympathy at this point - but before either of them can say more, Laurel hears someone come up behind them. She turns, and -- sure enough, it’s Motorcycle Guy.

“Everything okay here?” he asks, glancing between them carefully.

“We’re fine, Cloud,” Dolores assures before Laurel can even snap at him. What kind of stupid name is Cloud, anyway? “I need to go get cleaned up -- I can’t go to my interview like this --”  She stops, eyeing Laurel again.  “Do you need... help? I could drive you somewhere...”

Some part of her registers surprise at Dolores - who seems to have reason enough to detest her already - even offering, but the kind of numbness that’s set in to override her shock and panic supersedes that. Laurel’s not even sure how anyone could help her. She shakes her head distantly.

“I’m... just going to go back to my hotel room, actually. But thanks.”

Knowing she’s done nothing to reassure them about her behavior - but to exhausted to care -  Laurel turns away and starts trekking numbly back towards her car.  Maybe this time, at least, she can actually stop at the convenience store for some supplies before that storm sets in.

The best she can hope is that tomorrow she’ll wake up, and things will have somehow set themselves right.

Dread creeps up on her when she registers what has woken her up the next morning.  Laurel swears, after this - if there even is an ‘after this’ - she’s never going to listen to AC/DC again.

She remembers thinking last night that if she had to wake up to the same day one more time, she might just scream, or -- explode, or something. So the resignation she drags herself out of bed with surprises even her.

She goes through the motions of the morning almost robotically, and somehow (because of course there couldn’t be an upside to any of this) she still isn’t any more on schedule when she drags herself past Ratchet and out the front door. 

This time, though, she stares at that missed call from Sara for a few heartbeats longer, and imagines what it might be like if she returned it. ‘Hey, Sara, funny you should call. I think I’m losing my mind -- any idea what to do about being stuck in a timeloop?’

Yeah. What a way to reconcile.  

She drives off rather morosely, lost in thought, and thus somehow still - still - forgets about Cloud.  Though she does wince a little this time when she sees him hit that snowbank.

But then something occurs to Laurel. She eyes the now-empty road in front of her, acutely conscious of the angrily honking cars behind her, and thinks -- what is this changes something? Maybe all of this is... karma, or something. Maybe Cloud is some Beauty and the Beast-esque wizard who cursed her for ruining his morning. Who knows. She’ll take just about any explanation, at this point. 

She pulls over to the side of the road, and by the time she gets out of the car, Cloud is already pulling himself out of the snow.  “Hey, uh, sorry about that,” Laurel tells him stiffly.  “My head is... somewhere else today. You okay?”

He glances at her in muted surprise.  “...You actually stopped.”

“Yeah, I know. I surprise even myself sometimes.”  

Cloud seems to be having trouble pulling his foot out of the snowbank, so Laurel awkwardly grabs him by the arm to help haul him out. That accomplished, they both awkwardly turn to stare at his fallen motorbike.

“You... need a ride into town?” Laurel asks finally.

Cloud shakes his head slowly, then crosses to the bike to pick it up off the ground.  “It’s survived worse scrapes than this. Should be fine.”

“Right.” Laurel just kind of stands there for a moment.  Nothing really feels different. “Well, I should... get to work, then.”

As she’s walking back to her car, though, Cloud calls after her -- “Thanks. For stopping.”

In spite of that, however, the only thing that ends up changing is that Laurel’s a little more late to work than usual, and Camille and Felix are a little more disapproving. Laurel can practically mouth along with the town mayor’s exclamation at the groundhog seeing its shadow, at this point. Six more weeks of winter. 

Is that what it’s going to take? Six more weeks of this?

She just goes to the coffee shop out of habit, at this point -- and maybe also in part because familiar faces are all she has to cling to, at this point. This time, she at least manages not to give Dolores the full blast of her coffee spillage, but she does make sure to spill a little, if only so Dolores will stop and talk to her.

She’s not sure if that makes her pathetic or just an asshole.

“Sorry,” Laurel mutters, already pulling the napkins she snagged from the counter earlier out of her purse. Dolores’ immediate indignation seems slightly stifled as she takes them.

“...Have you ever tried watching where you’re going?” she asks with less bite than Laurel can remember in the previous two days.

“Yeah, I know.” She guesses she at least deserves that much.  “I know you have a job interview, and I promise I’ll let you make it tomorrow, I just -- I don’t know. I’m trying to find ways to make all of this feel real.”

Dolores raises her eyebrows, and Laurel supposes it must be because there are at least three different elements of that response that make absolutely no sense to her. “Is that a television star thing?” she asks after a moment, dabbing gingerly at her coat. “Finding ways to make things seem more real?”

Laurel laughs halfheartedly. “I wish.” 

She doesn’t know what else to say, so she just helps Dolores clean up until Cloud arrives on the scene.

“Everything --” His gaze shifts from Dolores to Laurel, and he pauses.  “...Okay here?”

“Our special guest spilled her coffee on me,” Dolores explains dryly.

Cloud regards her bemusedly for a moment.  “You sure are accident-prone.”  When Dolores looks up in question, he goes on to explain, “She kind of helped me wreck my bike earlier this morning. But to her credit, she also helped me fix it.”

“Not really,” Laurel puts in, feeling inexplicably awkward.  “I just kind of... stopped and watched you fix it.”

“Well. It’s the thought that counts.”

Dolores stares at her thoughtfully. “And here I thought someone with your big city schedule wouldn’t have the time.”

Laurel shifts a little.  “Well, you don’t really know me.”  Yet somehow she feels like that’s unfair when she’s spent the past few days being an asshole to Dolores, whether Dolores remembers it or not. 

Dolores frowns at her faintly without comment. Then she turns to Cloud.  “Since my interview’s off the table, we should try and hit the store before the storm rolls in.”

Cloud nods -- then, to Laurel’s surprise, he turns to her contemplatively.  “You... want to come with us?”

Already resigned to dragging herself back to the inn for the day, Laurel stops in her tracks. On one hand, she doesn’t really need the supplies, since more likely than not she won’t have anything she buys by tomorrow morning. On the other hand, the offer kind of startles her. She realizes she’s waiting for Dolores to object -- but Dolores only glances at Cloud and then turns to watch her, waiting for an answer.

“Uh,” Laurel says, literally unable to think of a reason to refuse. Besides, it’ll probably look weird if she isn’t planning to stock up. “Sure. Why not.”

The three of them set off together without further fanfare. Laurel can’t help feeling a little awkward in their company, like some kind of third wheel, especially since Cloud doesn’t seem especially inclined to talk much (to her, at least). So she’s a little surprised when Dolores falls into step beside her, voice lowered.

“What did you mean, earlier -- when you said you’d let me make my job interview tomorrow?”

Oh. Laurel had kind of forgotten that had slipped out. She spends a moment trying to think up a response that sounds sane and reasonable, but comes up blank. Then she figures, well, what’s the worst that can happen if she tells the truth? Dolores will have forgotten by tomorrow.

“It’s gonna sound pretty crazy,” she warns. When Dolores only stares at her expectantly, she continues, “Okay, so this whole... morning. For me, it’s happened before. This is the third time, actually.”

Dolores doesn’t immediately look at her like she’s grown a second head, which Laurel supposes is something, but she does look sort of confused. “What do you mean, ‘happened before’? Like some sort of loop?”

“Yes. That.” Laurel watches her from the corner of her eye. “I don’t... really have an explanation, or anything, I just know that it does. Every day I’ve spent here I’ve woken up to the same stupid song, and a missed call from my sister, and almost killing Cloud on my way to work. Which I’m late for every single time, coincidentally. And then I go to that coffee shop and spill coffee all over you, and you -- usually get really mad at me.”

“Well. It was a very nice coat.”

Laurel snorts, and then backtracks.  “ -- Wait. That’s it? You believe me?”

Dolores shrugs faintly.  “I’m not sure. But you obviously believe you.” She pauses bemusedly, then adds.  “This isn’t the kind of story people tell a stranger when they’re not completely convinced.”

Laurel thinks that over and concludes that she’s probably right.  “So. Any idea what I should do? You know, hypothetically.”

She’s still a little surprised when Dolores seems to take her question seriously.  “If it were me...”  She trails off briefly, brow furrowed.  “If I had to live the same day over and over again, I guess I’d try to make the most of it.”

“And how would you do that?”

“Well, everyone has mistakes that they wish they could go back and fix. Even from day to day. Things they wanted to say but didn’t, letters they never sent... or calls they never made.” Dolores gives her something of a pointed look. “Coffee they could’ve avoided spilling.”

Laurel tries to look at least a little bit sheepish at that, just out of common decency.  “So... what. You think this might end if I finally get... whatever I’m supposed to get right?” It hadn’t worked with Cloud, but maybe that hadn’t been The thing. Or maybe she was supposed to get some kind of perfect score. Not do a single mean, dismissive thing to anyone.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Dolores says levelly.  “...Either way, having infinite chances to get things right is something some people would kill for.”

Laurel doesn’t say much else after that, but she considers it the rest of the way to the store. And after they’re finished shopping, Cloud and Dolores surprise her by telling her about the blizzard party they’re planning - which isn’t much of a party, just stockpiling supplies and marathoning movies until the power goes out - and when they invite her along, Laurel swallows her shock long enough to accept.

It’s the stupid, cozy kind of thing she might have made fun of in some other context, but it ends up being the best afternoon she’s had in... well, actually, since even before all of this started. 

She almost forgets, by the end of it, that Dolores and Cloud won’t remember her tomorrow morning. But she wakes up with Dolores’ words still ringing in her ears anyway.

The next few days and beyond roll out at a snail’s pace, but Laurel finds that it’s the diversifying that keeps her sane. At least, that’s the excuse she’s using for following Dolores’ advice.

It’s actually not that difficult, for instance, to avoid almost killing Cloud on the road into town. She lets him cut in front of her every morning now, and if she’s ever feeling particularly impatient or frustrated, imagining him catapulting into the snowbank once or twice is usually enough to suffice.

She tries to appreciate Camille and Felix a little more when she sees them, even if it mostly just seems to kind of weird them out. She’s usually a little more on time for work, too -- the one day she isn’t is because she stopped on a whim to buy everyone donuts, and afterwards, she decides it was mostly worth the collective sugar rush.

It’s funny, but after awhile, even Beacon Heights itself starts to seem a little less obnoxious. Maybe it’s because it’s all getting so familiar, or -- maybe there’s some kind of magic in looking at people, even the most cutesy, cliche, insufferable people, and trying to find something to like about them. It all starts to make her feel lighter, somehow, than she has in a long while. Even if it’s still pretty annoying when they get all hyped up over that damn groundhog.

She even gets into the habit of saying hi to Ratchet in the mornings, which seems to thrill him. She never does take him up on that coffee, though.

Largely because visiting the local coffee shop, kind of embarrassingly, has become the highlight of the day she’s living on repeat. The one thing she never tries to change. She’s stopped spilling her coffee on poor Dolores, of course, just like she promised -- actually, she finds that if she takes a seat at the diner’s counter and just waits for a little while, Dolores will usually talk to her when she comes in to order.

And Dolores is... nice to talk to. At first Laurel just chalks it up to her being one of the few vaguely sane-seeming people in this town, and the fact that Laurel herself doesn’t generally have a lot of friends. But as the days pass, and she gets new pieces to put together, she starts to realize they have more in common than she ever would have thought.

Dolores was an outsider here once, it turns out. She moved to Beacon Heights five years ago, and says she didn’t stop feeling like she didn’t belong until after the first year. And she has problems with her family, too -- turns out it was a father she was estranged from for awhile, not her sister, but her understanding when Laurel brings Sara up even in passing is nice.

One of the days, on an impulse she doesn’t even consciously process until it’s too late, Laurel asks Dolores if she wants to get dinner after her interview. It honestly kind of stuns her when Dolores accepts. Except it’s all so much that she honestly, genuinely forgets about the blizzard, and when they end up snowed in together she’s vaguely horrified at the idea that Dolores might think she’d planned this all along.

Not that Dolores really seems like she’d mind the idea. But Laurel doesn’t try anything anyway.  Something about it feels too -- well, for Dolores, it’s only been a day, but for Laurel it’s been -- how long had it been? Had she actually lost track?

All the same. It doesn’t feel fair, somehow.

But when she wakes up the next morning alone, she becomes fully conscious of how much the thought that Dolores won’t remember her today - or any day - aches. And that’s when she knows she’s in trouble.

Romantic feelings are typically something Laurel tries not to tangle with, as a rule. She hasn’t really seriously dated since Ollie in college, a wound that - if she’s honest - she’s still not entirely sure she can call healed, but even the majority of her casual relationships since then have had a tendency to end badly. 

Depressing as it is to wake up every morning smitten with a girl who has yet to have any idea who she is, Laurel occasionally wonders if it’s better that way. If she was given the option of a future with Dolores -- wouldn’t she just find some way to screw that up too?

This way, at least, she doesn’t have anything to be afraid of. Except sometimes she feels like if she did have the chance...

It’s just that Laurel’s never really bought into all that sappy shit about the people you really care about making you a better person, up until now. She tries to give herself some of the credit she can grudgingly admit she deserves, but it’s not just reliving the same day over and over and seeing the results of her differing choices that makes her want to be better.

It’s the way Dolores smiles at her when she does something kind. It’s the way Dolores seems to find sincere inspiration and appreciation in all the stupid, simple things about this town that Laurel once would have thought were just -- well, stupid and simple.

Maybe it’s that more than anything that has her sitting in her car on the latest of the now-uncountable mornings, staring at her phone. At the missed call from Sara. Fear and indecisiveness make her limbs feel rigid, but she knows she must look like an idiot sitting unresponsively in her unheated car, and the minutes before work are ticking away, so she hits the ‘Return call’ button before she can psych herself out of it.

Sara’s phone rings a few times. Laurel inevitably wonders if she’s changed her mind, decided Laurel’s not worth it after all, is just going to ignore the call and let it go to voicemail. Or maybe Sara had only called her by mistake in the first place. She’d never considered that. Maybe --

“Laurel?”

Laurel swallows when she hears her sister’s voice.

“Hey, Sara.”

There’s something of a disbelieving pause on the other end, but Sara’s voice sounds surprisingly warm when she finally responds.  “I’m, uh -- I’m glad you called me back.”

“Yeah.” Laurel winces a little at the automatic response, and quickly adds -- “Uh, you didn’t leave a message, so I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble, or...”

“No! No, I -- just wanted to talk, I guess. ...It’s been awhile.” Sara still sounds a little hesitant, and Laurel feels like she’s walking on glass, but at the same time there’s hope starting to bubble in her chest.

“I missed you,” she says instead of whatever careful thing she’d planned on saying. By the time it actually registers, it’s too late to take it back, and all she can do is sit there, frozen, as silence stretches on the other end of the line.

And then, just as she’s sure Sara is going to rebuke her, remind her of all the reasons she has to be angry at and disappointed in Laurel, she hears Sara exhale shakily.

“I missed you too.”

“...And then she asked me to come visit her at her new place in New York. So I think I’m gonna head up there once I’m... once I’m done here,” Laurel finishes the story quietly.

Skipping the part (of course) where doesn’t know when she’ll be ‘done here’, and that by tomorrow, Sara won’t remember that she called. But Laurel will know she did. Laurel will know she can. 

It feels like it means something, for all that most people would call this much repetition pointless.

“That’s sweet,” Dolores smiles at her warmly.  “Family’s usually more willing to reconcile than we build them up to be in our heads. I remember my father was, after we went without speaking for almost a year.”

Laurel already knows this, of course, but she smiles back anyway.

They’re sitting in Dolores’ living room on the evening of the same day, warming themselves with hot cocoa as the snow piles up outside. It’s homier than Laurel can ever remember it feeling. She watches Dolores and hesitates a second.

“This isn’t going to make a lot of sense to you,” she begins carefully.  “But without you, I never would have called her. So thanks.”

Dolores pauses, clearly surprised.  “...But we hadn’t even met until this morning.”

“It’s... complicated.” Laurel tries to ignore the lump she feels forming in her throat. “I told you all about it once, and you just kind of... accepted it. Gave me some advice. It was pretty amazing, actually.” She doesn’t know why this time feels different.

Dolores doesn’t respond right away. She just watches Laurel carefully, almost as if she’s searching for something in her face. “You’re talking like we already know each other,” she says finally.  “The funny thing is, part of me feels like that’s true.”

Laurel waits. Maybe because she’s hoping, just a little, that Dolores will somehow magically, miraculously remember everything. But Dolores just continues watching her contemplatively, even if there’s something in her eyes that seems... softer now.

Whatever it is, even if it’s something that neither of them will ever be able to define, it gives Laurel the last bit of courage she needs. And this time, it isn’t because she knows Dolores won’t remember anything tomorrow and that if she screws this up there won’t be any real consequences.

It’s because even if this day keeps resetting for the rest of forever, Laurel has figured out that these are the kinds of things that matter. And they always will.

“Listen,” she begins softly. “I’ve never been very good at... reaching out to people. I’ve always used this rounded logic where I’m better off alone for a laundry list of reasons, but the truth is, I really just don’t want to lose anyone else. And I know that probably sounds like a stupid excuse to stop trying for the rest of my life, so -- I’m not going to use it anymore.”  She swallows.

“Because if we can connect like we did... today, then it doesn’t really hold up anymore. So thank you, Dolores. Really.”

She searches Dolores’ expression carefully, sincerely. By now, most of the light has gone out of the room and it’s just the firelight illuminating their features. It makes Dolores look softer, somehow.  Laurel bites back the instinct to ignore the butterflies in her stomach when Dolores smiles at her.

“Sounds like you’re the one who did most of the work,” she says finally. Laurel considers that for a moment -- before Dolores slowly leans forward to kiss her.

It catches Laurel off guard, but only for a few seconds. Then she kisses back. It’s soft and careful and not particularly intense, and Laurel supposes she’ll never be able to put into words how much it means to her. But Dolores reaches up to touch the side of her face tenderly as they break apart, and Laurel lets herself get lost in the moment anyway.

Tomorrow, everything will be different. And the same. But tonight, she lets herself fall asleep on Dolores’ couch, nestled against Dolores herself, and can’t quite bring herself to regret it.

The sound of birds obnoxiously twittering outside the window wakes her. That by itself is odd, though it takes her a little while to shake the fogginess from her head and actually process why.

Birds. No Highway to Hell.

Laurel stirs and then, with sudden realization, bolts all the way upright. The next thing she processes is that her surroundings are relatively unfamiliar. And the next is that she’s accidentally woken the person sleeping next to her.

“Ow,” Dolores mumbles, stretching the stiffness from her limbs.  “...Falling asleep on the couch is always less romantic in practice.”

“Dolores?” Laurel breathes, scarcely able to believe it. Dolores pauses mid-stretch, casting her a concerned look.

“What? Are you alright?”

It’s over. It’s -- tomorrow.

Laurel wracks her brain to try and pin down what it was that finally did it. Calling Sara? Her conversation with Dolores? The kiss?

Maybe it was less one thing and more a kind of building of a lot of them. That doesn’t make perfect sense to her right now, because it has to be eight in the morning at the very latest, and she’s still half-trying to wake herself up and acknowledge this is real.

But one thing that’s apparent to her with perfect clarity is that Dolores is still here. Next to her. Laurel gives in to a shaky smile. “Yeah,” she manages finally.  “Yeah -- everything’s fine. Sorry, I was just having a -- a really weird dream.”  She’s so relieved that she might have hugged Dolores, but she’s lucky Dolores doesn’t think she’s completely crazy as it is.

Dolores returns her smile a little uncertainly, but warmly.  “I’m glad you woke me. I was going to offer to take you to breakfast, but I wasn’t sure what time you had to leave --”

Leave?

She’d given up on breaking free of the loop long enough to forget: the storm’ll be dying down now. Felix and Camille will be expecting her back on the road before too long.

All she really wants, though, is to stay here with Dolores, and go to breakfast at that stupid, cutesy diner, and then call her sister, and have a conversation that’ll stick this time. And maybe do something sappy like going for a walk through the snow afterwards.

She wants a hundred more days exactly like that. She’s not sure when the town she couldn’t wait to get away from became something close to home.

Laurel weighs all of this against the prospect of going back to a job that never really made her happy to begin with. As completely cliche as it is to admit, there’s probably something to be learned in all of this about the things that actually matter. And not wasting them.

“If I said I wanted to stay a little while longer,” she says slowly. “What would you think?”

Dolores sort of double-takes, like she’s not sure whether or not Laurel’s being serious. “...Can you do that?”

“What’s stopping me?” Laurel shrugs pointedly.

“But you --” Dolores stops, watching Laurel even more closely, and there’s something like wonder in her expression. It’s almost enough to make Laurel feel a little self-conscious.  “ -- You really want to stay.”

Laurel can’t help but smile. “I’m pretty sure that is what I implied.”

Impulsively, Dolores leans forward and kisses her again, and this time Laurel is actually ready for it.