Part I
Welcome to the one-shot three-shot I have been working on since I happened to see someone else writing a fic with this silly pun name while hyperfixating on Groundhog Day the musical in 2017. It's been a long time coming.
This story is based on my 2007-2010 Pokémorph fanfic Morphic. More specifically, it contains major spoilers for how it ends, so make sure you're at peace with that if you're going to read this, and it's written assuming you're already familiar with the original sequence of events, though it shouldn't be impossible to understand the gist of what's going on (or at least what matters about it) from the context. It is, ultimately, a whump fic: the purpose of writing it was to put a character (Dave, of course) through the wringer more than anything else, but along the way, it's also a general character study, a series of hypotheticals and situations, and does feature some fun bits of the fic's other characters as well, to varying extents. Its nature does mean that it prioritizes the character study and whump situations over plot coherence a bit; there are some fridge logic moments here that I'm basically just willing to handwave because it's not really the point.
The story has already been completed, but will be posted in three parts when I get the chance over the next week or two. The splits are thematic - each of the parts has a bit of a different vibe from the others, though it’s one continuous storyline.
Feedback preferences: Anything goes, though like I said, this probably isn't a story where you ought to be overthinking the plot. Tell me if something's really distracting you, but no need to try to pick nits. I'm just here to have fun tormenting Dave.
“Dave. Dave, wake up. We should check on the kids, see how they’re holding up.”
He stirred, elbowing Martha’s hands away. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Okay.”
Dave clutched his head in his hands for a few seconds as his brain throbbed. Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk quite this much last night. Not that he was sure exactly how much it’d been; most of the evening was, thankfully, a murky cloud by now.
He rubbed his eyes before opening them, wincing as he blinked. The morning sunlight made its way mercilessly past even the firmly drawn curtains, casting cruel strips of blinding light on the white walls. Fuck the sun.
He took a deep breath or two and then pushed himself up from the couch. The others were already up and waiting, their faces pale and exhausted. Cheryl didn’t look entirely like she’d gotten any sleep at all, bags under her eyes, her hair a tangled mess.
She leaned against the door to the girls’ room and gave it a careful knock. “Kids? Are you awake?”
Silence. So somehow the kids were sleeping just fine. Good for them.
She glanced back at everyone and gently opened the door. Then, as she stepped inside, she suddenly froze, staring. He automatically leaned over to look over her shoulder and –
Empty sleeping bags lay strewn across the floor in disorderly piles. By the window stood Lucy, alone, turning around to look at them, tilting her head innocently. Dave blinked. What?
Cheryl pushed the door all the way open in alarm. The room was empty, nobody else there. “Lucy?” she asked, wary. “Where are the others?”
“They left,” Lucy said simply, looking back out the window. “They’re going to save Gabriel.”
Dave stared at her. “What?” Cheryl looked back at the others in horror, silent. “Fuck. What?”
“They took Dan and Martha’s car.”
“What?”
“Fuck.” Dave dug into his pocket for his cellphone. “Hold on, I’ll call Jean. Talk some fucking sense into them. What the fuck.”
-------
Mia was dead. So was Will. Gabriel was in critical condition at the hospital. Jack and Peter and Katherine had all been shot. Hell, they’d killed the fucking dog.
Jean was okay, aside from the burns on the inside of her mouth and looking like she’d been struck by a furry whirlwind. Lucy was okay, aside from being mute and staring into space like a shellshocked war veteran. That was something. Jean, exhausted after crying for hours, fell asleep at the Kerrigans’ house, and he took her home and put her into bed and then tossed the gun into a drawer and sat by her bedside for a while, squeezing the armrests of a hastily-moved chair, watching her alien new form breathing contentedly and somehow loathing it with every fiber of his being.
Eventually exhaustion got the better of him. After he woke with a start some time later and nearly toppled the chair over, he dragged himself over to his bedroom. It was almost too early for bed, really, but he just wanted this fucking day to end. Maybe, hopefully, tomorrow he could actually think.
-------
He awoke again to hands shaking him. “Dave. Dave, wake up. We should check on the kids, see how they’re holding up.”
“Huh?” His brain was still the same sludge as the day before. Martha? What was she doing here? “What are you talking about?”
“Gabriel, the kidnapping. Wake up.”
“That was… that was yesterday,” he mumbled.
“And they’re probably still worried sick. Aren’t you?” She pulled his arm to drag him out of – no, he wasn’t in his bed, he was on the couch at the Kerrigans’ place. He blinked rapidly. A dream. It had all just been some fucked-up crazy dream.
Christ. He took a deep breath, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as Martha let go of him. “Jesus,” he muttered.
He stood up, inhaling and exhaling again, letting it all just fade into the haze of last night. Probably, hopefully, by lunchtime he wouldn’t even remember he’d dreamt anything. In the corner of the room, Cheryl nodded at him, leaning on the door to the girls’ room.
“Kids? Are you awake?”
Nothing. Dave shifted, glancing towards the windows, the drawn curtains, the light just squeezing past the edges. A strange unease crept slowly up his back, his pulse uncomfortably thick in his ears.
Lucy by the window. A pile of empty sleeping bags.
“Lucy? Where are the others?”
“They left. They’re going to save Gabriel. They took Dan and Martha’s car.”
Abruptly, Dave was swaying, nearly losing his balance before he managed to support himself against the wall. Cheryl whirled around as everyone looked at one another in horror. “You okay?”
“Sorry, just…” He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples for a moment. Fucking déjà vu. That was all it was, hypersensitive pattern-matching grabbing a vague memory of something kind of similar from the dream and insisting it was exactly the same. He’d… he’d probably heard them through his sleep when they’d left or something, and his brain had made up the rest. Fuck, it’d felt real, though. “I’ll… I’ll call Jean and talk some sense into them. Fuck.”
The others waited, silent, as he dug out his cellphone and dialed her number. In the dream, he remembered distinctly, he’d told the kids they were keeping Gabriel at the church, for some godforsaken reason. He sure as hell wasn’t doing that for real.
“Hi, Dad!” said Jean cheerfully.
“Jean, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? Get back here right now.”
“We’re saving Gabriel! We took the Harrisons’ car, and Katherine could totally drive it all the way over here! And Felicia can smell Gabriel, so we’re gonna go and torch all the bad guys!”
Even though he knew it was just déjà vu, it was still fucking disorienting. “Look, you’re not going to torch any bad guys. This isn’t a movie. You don’t even know where they are, and even if you did you’d all get yourselves killed. These are people with guns and you’re a bunch of fucking kids. Don’t be stupid. Come on home and we can figure this out.”
He heard disruption and then, suddenly, Jack’s voice. “What the hell else do you want us to do? Just leave him to die?”
“I mean, if you want to get into that, him dying is a fuckload better than him and all of you too.” Jack didn’t answer that one, probably rightly. Dave pressed his lips together. “Look, for all you know they don’t even have him anymore at this point. He could’ve gotten out. You’re planning to go endanger yourselves anyway for fucking nothing?”
Sure. In the dream, it was kind of a blur but he was pretty sure Gabriel had just… spontaneously developed fire powers and fucking straight-up murdered some guy. That definitely wasn’t happening, on multiple levels.
“My point is, if you try to play superheroes, you’re not going to be fine, because you’re not fucking superheroes. Just get the fuck back here, understand?”
There was a long silence on the other end. “All right,” Jack said at last. “Fine. We’ll come back.”
“Good, you’d better. And, uh…” This was incredibly dumb, but the image of the thing that Jean had become in that dream was still fucking unsettling. “By the way, you know you all shouldn’t touch evolution stones with your bare hands, right? For all we know it could make your organs explode out of your chest. Just… don’t do that.”
Jack paused. “What?”
“Never… never mind, just something I was thinking about. Just get home.”
And Jack hung up. Dave exhaled slowly as he lowered his phone. “They’re coming home,” he said. “It’s fine.”
-------
They didn’t come home. Somehow they managed to figure out who the kidnappers were and where they would be anyway (Dave had a horrible suspicion that Mia was involved), and they stormed the church.
Jean didn’t come out of it a misproportioned, furry mess; she came out of it in a body bag.
They were all dead when the ambulance got there, all of them except Mia who’d been shot in the back and had passed out from blood loss. Dave went with the Kerrigans to the hospital and sat there by her bed, drumming his fingers, restlessly watching Cheryl and Howard as they hugged each other close, pale and exhausted and weeping, like a cliché out of the latest inevitable award-bait tragedy-porn flick. Lucy had been standing by the bed for hours, silent, staring at her sister’s unconscious face, not moving.
“Why’d you let them go?” he asked when he couldn’t stand it anymore. Lucy turned slowly, blinking, but said nothing.
“Dave,” Cheryl said sharply.
“You’ve got… you can do more creepy Pokémon shit than any of them.” He waved a hand vaguely, voice shaking, anger boiling in his lungs. “Why’d you just watch them fucking go?”
“Dave,” Cheryl repeated, her voice icy. “Don’t take this out on her.”
Lucy backed away from him, eyes welling up with tears before she vanished into thin air. Cheryl sprang up, looking around, murmuring her name softly, but not before giving him a silent death glare. Howard sighed deeply, shaking his head with his face in his hands, so pathetic-looking that Dave almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
Dave exhaled, massaging his eyelids. Wasn’t like the functional eight-year-old could’ve done much anyway. What, like she should’ve rushed in there herself, gotten killed too? Fuck.
But it was no use saying sorry to empty air. Wouldn’t fix anything anyway, for her or anyone else.
Mia lay silent, unmoving in her bed, and Dave stared at her, fists clenched and shaking, until sometime, much later, he drifted off into some kind of sleep.
-------
“Dave. Dave, wake up.”
He started awake immediately, a strangled noise emerging from his throat, hands clutching at the sofa. Martha gave him a concerned, warily sympathetic look. “You all right?”
He just blinked. “We should check on the kids,” she went on. “See how they’re holding up.”
“I…” He stared at the others, standing in exactly the positions he remembered them. “Okay,” he croaked as he rose to his feet. Okay, okay, what the fuck. Science and rationality. Just pattern-matching, for fuck’s sake. For this kind of thing to mean anything, you’d have to predict what’d happen ahead of time. What did he remember of the dream, exactly? Cheryl had knocked on the door and said…
“Kids? Are you awake?”
A fluke. Just a couple of words. He struggled to pull up words, exact words, as she reached for the door handle. Lucy? Where are the others? That was what he remembered. They left. They’re going to save Gabriel. And now it’d be different, different words, different events, because –
“Lucy? Where are the others?”
“They left. They’re going to save Gabriel. They took Dan and Martha’s car.”
Dave’s ears rang as everything melted together, voices echoing incoherently as blood pounded in his ears. Before he knew it he’d turned, stormed out the door and slammed it behind him, glaring daggers at the gray, cloudy sky.
“You think this is funny, huh? Think this’ll make me come crawling back?” His voice shook with rage. “Well, why doesn’t every other motherfucker who loses his kids get a second fucking chance, huh? You couldn’t use your almighty fucking magic to tell your shitbag worshippers not to murder kids the first fucking time? You couldn’t spare one fucking second to cure malaria instead of fucking with me? Fuck you!”
The sky didn’t answer. Dave took a deep, agitated breath, then another.
Fuck. Whatever was really going on here, he wasn’t this far gone. He turned back to the house and grabbed the doorknob, but it didn’t turn.
Cheryl opened as soon as he knocked, giving him a look that said oh, Christ, she’d heard him, hadn’t she. “Never fucking mind,” he said, whirling back and making a beeline for his car.
He stepped into the driver’s seat, started the car and headed north before she could come out and stop him. He’d kill those motherfuckers himself if he had to. The drive was a blur; he wasn’t quite aware of himself until he’d parked somewhere by the side of the church, diagonally across at least two spaces, marched up to the door, and torn it open.
A man stood there, armed with a handgun, staring at him in surprise. “Murderous fuckers!” Dave snarled, raising his own gun.
His hand trembled as he aimed, jerked with the unfamiliar recoil, and the bullet shattered a stained-glass window. The next one hit, somewhere; the man jerked backwards and then swung his gun arm back around and pulled the trigger.
Something punched Dave in the lung. He blinked as something sharp stung in the wake of the punch, squeezed the trigger again and again as everything became warm and wet and he couldn’t breathe. The other man collapsed as the gun clicked uselessly. Dave tried to take a step forward only for the power to leave his legs, sending him crumpling to the floor.
The gun clattered against the stone; he tried to reach for it, but all he could see was his fingers twitching uselessly in a spreading pool of blood, and the other man further away, eyes glassy and frozen and staring unblinkingly back at him from a lifeless, blood-splattered face.
There was a strange, cold numbness spreading through him as he struggled to breathe, to squirm towards the gun. The more his lungs tried to pull in oxygen, the more the taste of blood rose in his throat. He tried to cough and everything hurt. This had been a really, really fucking stupid idea. Why’d he ever thought this’d fucking work? (Maybe he hadn’t, really.)
He coughed again, gurgling blood, a stab of pain shooting through the numbness. His racing heartbeat thumped deafeningly in his ears. God, why wouldn’t it just fucking end? The other guy stared lifelessly back at him, and Dave tried to savour the small victory of taking one of them down with him, but all he could feel was nausea and spreading, throbbing agony.
Somewhere in the distance, a door burst open. A scream – Katherine? Hands were shaking him, and he tried to tell them to go, just leave, but nothing happened. The last fuzzy thing he saw as the world began to fade, finally, was Mia’s face leaning down into his field of vision, frowning at him, like he’d just done something incredibly, incredibly dumb.
-------
And then he was back. He jerked awake, limbs flailing in Martha’s face as she tried to rouse him, his heart pounding, and sprang to his feet like the world’s most frazzled jack-in-the-box. He felt his chest – no holes, no blood, nothing – and only after staring at Martha’s baffled face for a moment did it properly sink in that it was that morning, again. It had rewound, again, and he wasn’t dead, and none of that had happened.
“You okay?” asked Cheryl.
“Yes. No. No! The kids are gone. They’re gone, off on a fucking suicide mission, again. Fuck!” He clutched his hair, fingers digging into his skull.
“What?” said Martha, skeptical; Cheryl ran to the girls’ room and opened it, gasping in shock.
“They went to save Gabriel,” Lucy said, and Dave marched into the room, grabbing her by the shoulders.
“Lucy. How do I fix it?”
She blinked at him in confusion. He shook her shoulders. “Lucy, I swear to fucking God, if you don’t tell me what’s going on and how I save them –”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Cheryl tore him away from Lucy with unexpected force, holding his arm in a painful grip, and Dave swayed on his feet.
“Ow, let me go, I just –”
“Not until you tell me what the fuck is going on and leave my daughter alone.” He stared at her, and she stared back, her gaze deadly firm. He’d never seen her quite this angry, and that sobered him a bit. He took a breath, his arm throbbing.
“Okay. Okay. Look, I’m… I’m stuck in a fucking loop. It was this same day yesterday, and the day before that. I know what happens. They go there and then they fucking die. Fuck!”
Cheryl glanced around silently. “Dave,” she said, loosening her grip on him slightly but not letting him go. “I think you should probably get a bit more rest.”
The others nodded in silent agreement. Dave stared wildly at them and opened his mouth, then closed it again. Yeah. He sounded like a fucking lunatic. Really, he would’ve been fucking worried if they had believed him.
“Okay,” he said and took a deep breath. “Yeah. I just… I’m just going to lie down and think for a bit.”
Cheryl didn’t let go of his arm until he’d laid himself back down onto the sofa. He pressed his hands against his eyelids, trying to soothe his pulsing headache, and tried not to listen to the others as they made phone calls and agitated arguments.
The first thing that flew into his head was to just walk out right now, drive to the nearest shooting range, practice until they closed, and then go to sleep, rinse and repeat, until he could waltz in there like a fucking action hero and dispose of the fuckers. Hell, apparently, if he failed he could just try again. Easy. Why not?
And yet, he didn’t move. His throat tightened with blood that wasn’t there, a coppery smell in his nostrils, quickening heartbeat thumping in his ears, lifeless, glassy eyes staring back and nausea rising in the back of his mouth, and he stayed rooted to the couch.
What the fuck kind of plan would that be, anyway? Save them, and then get arrested and tried for a fucking mass shooting in a church? Imagine the goddamn headlines.
It had to be possible to fix this. Somehow, he could make them turn back. And he had… his stomach did a queasy flip, but he could probably experiment. It’d all be reset anyway. He could do one thing, see what the consequences were, then do something else next time. It was a perfect setup, wasn’t it? Infinite replication with all variables identical, except for whatever he chose to change?
He started to sit up, but Cheryl pushed him back down. “I think you should stay there and let us handle this,” she said firmly.
Okay. Perhaps this wasn’t the best starting point. But that was fine. He had time. This was fine.
-------
The first thing he tried was to just not do anything. Sharon instead called Jack and tried to talk him out of it. Again, he promised they’d come back, but they didn’t. The outcome was the same as the first time, more or less: Jean returning home after touching a Fire Stone, Will and Mia dead.
For the next few goes, he tried calling Jean and saying different things. “Letting slip” that Gabriel was being held in a warehouse on the other side of town. They saw through it – Mia saw through it – and the same thing happened. Any time he warned Jean off the Fire Stone, everything somehow turned out worse.
Just taking a nap wasn’t enough to fast-forward to the next iteration. As best he could tell, after a few goes, it looped over at six AM. If he was awake by then, he’d just blink and find himself waking up on the sofa again. He restlessly accompanied the others to hospitals, nauseous as he identified Mia’s body for the fifth or sixth time, waiting to just get to sleep already so he could try again.
It crept up on him, finally, as he sat by Mia’s bedside once again, agitatedly trying to fall asleep on the hard chair, that technically he had a much quicker way to reset.
Yeah. Why not? He’d already died once. Be way fucking easier. He’d read enough at one point or another to not bungle it, to know where to shoot. Really it was a no-brainer.
He didn’t move. The bile in the back of his throat tasted of blood.
His gaze slid over to Mia, injured but alive this time around – not that it mattered, not that anything mattered when it’d all be erased in a few hours. She would tell him there was no reason not to, that he was just wasting his own time sitting here, trying to sleep in the world’s most uncomfortable chair. What was he even waiting for?
He stood up. Cheryl looked up at him, questioning. He pointed vaguely towards the restrooms. “I’m just…”
She nodded absently, looked away again.
Dave headed for the nearest bathroom, mouth dry, and the instant he’d closed and locked the door behind him, he was hit with a flash of intense nausea and only just managed to throw open the toilet and collapse in front of it before he was throwing up bile.
By the time he finally had control of himself and his stomach had settled into a dull, passive ache, he was shaking. He pushed himself weakly to his feet, rinsed out his mouth in the sink and then rose up again in front of the mirror, supporting himself on the brim of the sink. (God, he looked like shit.)
He pulled the gun out from under his belt and lifted it to his temple. His hand trembled in the mirror, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Willed himself to pull the trigger. Nothing happened.
This was dumb. Just fucking do it. He wouldn’t even actually die, for fuck’s sake.
Nothing. Why the fuck should he even care? They’d all just pop out of existence in a few hours anyway, gone like everything else.
Or would they? Was it the world that was looping, or just him? Would everything be erased, or would he be spawning an entire fucking alternate timeline where Howard and Cheryl watched him go in and lock the door, and then heard a bang, and would be left trying to explain to Mia when she woke up why he’d suddenly blown his brains out in a hospital bathroom?
(Worse, they probably wouldn’t even think it was that inexplicable, would they. Most of the kids were fucking dead. They’d just figure—)
There was an abrupt knock on the door, and he jumped, lowering the gun quickly, like a kid caught playing with something he shouldn’t.
“Dave?” It was Cheryl, of course it was. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Do you need anything?” Her voice was exhausted.
“No.” Goddamn it. Why was she there, acting like she cared?
“It’s going to… We’ll get through this. I know that’s easy for us to say, our girls are still…” She trailed off with a heavy sigh. “I can only imagine what you’re going through right now. But they need you. Mia needs you. And we’re… here for you.”
What the actual fuck did she think he was doing in here. “Look, I don’t…”
“I know that’s not something you want to hear, but maybe you should hear it anyway. I just… I’m so sorry about Jean.”
His fingers clenched around the handle of the gun. He heard a soft thump and a slide, like she’d just sat down against the wall outside.
“I just keep replaying it all in my head, wondering if there was anything we could have done,” she said, quieter, only barely audible through the door.
Yeah. That’s what I’m doing too, with my new time-travel powers. He imagined opening the door, telling her that and raising the gun again. Just seeing the look on her face before pulling the trigger. Why not? It’d all be reset. Even if it spawned an alternate timeline, wasn’t like he’d have to fucking live in it.
He stood and squeezed the gun, jaw clenched.
Fuck.
Slowly, he put the safety back on and stuffed it back under his belt.
“Still there?” she said on the other side.
“There’s only one door. Do the math.” He sank down by the door and rubbed at his face. He was so fucking tired. Maybe it’d be easier to fall asleep in here than on that goddamn chair.
There was a pause. “You don’t have to deal with this alone,” she said.
“Great. Thanks. Eagerly awaiting your bright ideas on resurrection.”
She let out a long, exhausted sigh. A few seconds passed in silence before there was a shuffling of fabric as she stood up again. “Can’t say I didn’t try.”
Dave flopped his head against the door behind him and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for sleep to come.
-------
“Hey. Jean? Where are you?”
“We’re saving Gabriel! We took Dan and Martha’s car and—”
“Look, it’s… it’s okay. You don’t have to do this. They just rescued Gabriel. He’s safe with the police. They just called to let us know.”
“Really?” Jean gasped over the phone. There was a little note of disappointment behind the relief in her voice. God, Jean.
The others were staring at him, faces shocked. Bill looked angry. Sure, let’s hear his genius idea. Their kids about to get slaughtered by a bunch of gun-wielding lunatics, and what, they were going to get on his case for fucking lying to them? Let them relive this day in a fucking loop, see what they came up with.
He heard indistinctly as Jean relayed the message to the others. There was a crackling as Jack took the phone, as usual.
“You sure? He’s safe?”
“Yeah. It’s all right, everything’s fine.”
“Weren’t you saying last night that probably some of them are in the police? How can you be sure they aren’t just saying they rescued him to stop us trying anything? Or that, that he’s even safe in their custody? When can he come home?”
Fuck. Had he said that to them? It’d been weeks by this point. “I called around, guy I know knew an officer he trusted, they put a team together. It’s fine.”
“It’s…” Jack hesitated. God, let him please just buy it, or he’d have to do a whole other iteration just to figure out a better fucking lie. “He’s really okay?”
“He’s fine.”
There was no way to tell whether Jack really believed him. The previous times he’d sure also made it sound like yeah, they’d be coming back, only to not do it. Dave paced, and drank half a bottle of scotch, and tried to tune out the others’ conversation about whether this was right and what they could possibly tell them when they got there, until the doorbell rang.
He held Jean, okay and fine and normal, for a long time, and didn’t have the voice to say anything at all.
Mia was looking at him intently from where she stood, and he half-expected her to bust out one of her sudden inspired deductions about everything based on the exact rate of his pulse or the contraction of his pupils or whatever the fuck. Instead, it was Jack who first asked about Gabriel and Bill who told him he was still at the church and always had been.
Jack stared at Dave mutely for a moment. Then he screamed and lunged. Dave let go of Jean, shoving her out of the way just before Jack’s fist barreled into his stomach. He staggered backward, wind knocked out of him, and before he could do anything at all, Jack’s antennae lit up with electricity and swung into his shoulder. His muscles seized up, everything cramping, and he hit the floor hard, teeth clamping down on the edge of his tongue.
“You fucked-up asshole,” Jack snarled, voice breaking, struggling as his parents pulled him back. “They’re going to kill him and you don’t even care!”
Dave tried to breathe through his nose as his mouth filled with blood, body locked in a fetal position, every muscle in his body simultaneously on fire. Cheryl and Dan were rushing to check on him, but all he could do was grunt vaguely. Jean watched with tears in her eyes, as betrayed as the rest.
Of course Jack wanted to head out again, but at least his parents were firm that that had never been a good idea and wouldn’t help anyone, and they sure as hell weren’t leaving him alone to rally the others again. Instead, Jack insisted they actually do what Dave’d said he’d done – call around, find a trustworthy connection with the police.
Dave sat on the sofa, silent, arms folded, glaring at nothing, with another glass of scotch. Yeah. Maybe they should’ve just done that in the first fucking place.
He downed the rest of the glass as the others made phone calls. His tongue was still aching and uncomfortable in his mouth, the cut stinging at the alcohol. Who the fuck would he have called anyway? But eventually someone bit and said they’d be looking into it.
They waited, and waited. Eventually Jean exhaustedly joined him on the couch, sniffling, curling up against him, and he put his arm around her and pulled her close.
He dozed off like that, eventually, after a long, long time, until he started awake at his phone buzzing in his pocket and fumbled to answer it.
“Hello, David Ambrose.”
The same voice from yesterday (weeks ago), laced with smug malice. Ice shot through his veins, evaporating the exhaustion out of his brain.
“Let him go,” he growled.
“Unfortunately you didn’t hold up your end of the deal. You know what that means.”
Fuck. Fuck. How the fuck had he even known? “The fuck are you talking about?”
“You know perfectly well.” There were faint sounds of movement from the other end of the phone, the opening of a door, footsteps. “Did you know, he was trying to escape earlier today? We had to tie him up.”
Dave pressed the phone to his ear, heartbeat thundering in his head. “Let him go, you piece of shit.” His voice was shaky and unconvincing. “Look, we can—”
Another door opened, and suddenly he could hear a muffled scream. “Say goodbye. There will be a next time. Remember this then.”
“Hello?” came Gabriel’s voice, panicked as whatever had covered his mouth was removed. “Help! Someone, please, he’s—”
There was a gunshot, and then dead silence.
“Gabriel?” The other end hung up. His phone slid uselessly out of his grip.
Jean clutched his shoulder, sobbing quietly. Why’d they even tried? Fuckers. He’d always known this was a bad idea. Why’d he even fucking let them? Wordlessly, he pulled Jean close and squeezed her tightly.
Wasn’t this basically the ideal outcome, anyway, the one he’d been trying for? Only one fucking dead kid, Jean alive and well? Maybe with that achieved, the loop would break and they could all move on with their lives.
There was an icy pit in his stomach that wouldn’t go away.
“S-shouldn’t we tell the others?” Jean murmured.
He took a deep, sickening breath. “Yeah. I’m… Hold on.”
He let go of her, gently, and rose up, stumbling into the kitchen. He’d expected it to be empty, but Mia was standing there, hand in a bag of beef jerky. Alive and well, too.
“I was hungry,” she said.
“They shot Gabriel,” he said, his voice shaking uselessly.
Mia nodded. “They said they would do that.”
“How did they even fucking know? I just…”
“You said they rigged a Gardevoir test. Maybe they’re using Psychic Pokémon.”
Maybe. Did it even fucking matter? Just one more thing that didn’t work, because nothing worked.
“Hey, Mia.” He found the bottle of scotch, poured out another glass with trembling hands. “Say you could go back in time and just redo something. Do it better. What do you do?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You can’t do that.”
He waved a hand. “Hypothetically imagine it, okay. Just, humour me for a moment.”
“Can I only go back once, or many times?”
He raised an eyebrow. “As many times as it takes.” And what, then it’d stop? Who said it would? Maybe he’d save them all, do everything perfectly, and it’d just fucking reset itself again and undo it. His personal Hell, forever. Maybe that was what this was.
He downed the glass as Mia thought about it, the cut on his tongue burning, and started to pour out another.
“If I didn’t do something right the first time, it’s because I didn’t know all the information to do it right,” she said. “So once I know what happens, I have the information. Maybe something changes when I do it again, but it’s only going to take a few tries.”
“Well, what if the thing you’re trying to get right isn’t even really about something you did, it’s other people. How do you convince them to not do what you know is going to be a goddamn disaster, when nobody’s going to believe you’re a fucking time-traveler who knows the future?”
Mia frowned. “You could prove that you know things you couldn’t know. They should listen if they’re smart. But people are weird.”
Huh. Dave swirled the drink in his glass for a moment. “Yeah. That’s a good point.”
He finished the glass and went rummaging through the cupboards for more alcohol.
-------
Dave woke on the sofa again with his head pounding and just wanted to go back to sleep for at least another fifty years.
He waved Martha away vaguely, couldn’t get his eyes to do anything but stare at the curtains. She gave up and went to check on the kids. Gabriel’s scream and the gunshot that cut it off into silence echoed in his ears under the sickening slow thump of his pulse in his temples.
He told himself to get up and call Mia, but his body was made of lead, the thought floating vaguely by without doing anything. What would it actually accomplish, anyway? The universe would just find some new way to twist the knife. Maybe his next intervention would just kill a different one. Maybe he’d save them all and then a fucking cartoon piano would fall on Jean, just to spite him.
The others tried to get a response out of him, but not for very long; they had better things to think about. As they began to call around, the same insufferable panicked voices clamoring obliviously for the twentieth time, Dave realized there was no fucking point.
He pulled out the gun. When someone screamed his name, he was already squeezing the trigger.
Maybe, he managed to think before the bang, this was how to get out of it all along. Maybe this was just it, and it’d be over.
And then, he was back on the sofa.
This story is based on my 2007-2010 Pokémorph fanfic Morphic. More specifically, it contains major spoilers for how it ends, so make sure you're at peace with that if you're going to read this, and it's written assuming you're already familiar with the original sequence of events, though it shouldn't be impossible to understand the gist of what's going on (or at least what matters about it) from the context. It is, ultimately, a whump fic: the purpose of writing it was to put a character (Dave, of course) through the wringer more than anything else, but along the way, it's also a general character study, a series of hypotheticals and situations, and does feature some fun bits of the fic's other characters as well, to varying extents. Its nature does mean that it prioritizes the character study and whump situations over plot coherence a bit; there are some fridge logic moments here that I'm basically just willing to handwave because it's not really the point.
The story has already been completed, but will be posted in three parts when I get the chance over the next week or two. The splits are thematic - each of the parts has a bit of a different vibe from the others, though it’s one continuous storyline.
Feedback preferences: Anything goes, though like I said, this probably isn't a story where you ought to be overthinking the plot. Tell me if something's really distracting you, but no need to try to pick nits. I'm just here to have fun tormenting Dave.
This story features some strong violence including gun violence, suicide and suicidal thoughts, brief vomiting, a deluge of strong and demeaning language, consumption of alcohol, heavy emotional distress, existential horror, and a whole lot of children dying.
Part I
“Dave. Dave, wake up. We should check on the kids, see how they’re holding up.”
He stirred, elbowing Martha’s hands away. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Okay.”
Dave clutched his head in his hands for a few seconds as his brain throbbed. Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk quite this much last night. Not that he was sure exactly how much it’d been; most of the evening was, thankfully, a murky cloud by now.
He rubbed his eyes before opening them, wincing as he blinked. The morning sunlight made its way mercilessly past even the firmly drawn curtains, casting cruel strips of blinding light on the white walls. Fuck the sun.
He took a deep breath or two and then pushed himself up from the couch. The others were already up and waiting, their faces pale and exhausted. Cheryl didn’t look entirely like she’d gotten any sleep at all, bags under her eyes, her hair a tangled mess.
She leaned against the door to the girls’ room and gave it a careful knock. “Kids? Are you awake?”
Silence. So somehow the kids were sleeping just fine. Good for them.
She glanced back at everyone and gently opened the door. Then, as she stepped inside, she suddenly froze, staring. He automatically leaned over to look over her shoulder and –
Empty sleeping bags lay strewn across the floor in disorderly piles. By the window stood Lucy, alone, turning around to look at them, tilting her head innocently. Dave blinked. What?
Cheryl pushed the door all the way open in alarm. The room was empty, nobody else there. “Lucy?” she asked, wary. “Where are the others?”
“They left,” Lucy said simply, looking back out the window. “They’re going to save Gabriel.”
Dave stared at her. “What?” Cheryl looked back at the others in horror, silent. “Fuck. What?”
“They took Dan and Martha’s car.”
“What?”
“Fuck.” Dave dug into his pocket for his cellphone. “Hold on, I’ll call Jean. Talk some fucking sense into them. What the fuck.”
-------
Mia was dead. So was Will. Gabriel was in critical condition at the hospital. Jack and Peter and Katherine had all been shot. Hell, they’d killed the fucking dog.
Jean was okay, aside from the burns on the inside of her mouth and looking like she’d been struck by a furry whirlwind. Lucy was okay, aside from being mute and staring into space like a shellshocked war veteran. That was something. Jean, exhausted after crying for hours, fell asleep at the Kerrigans’ house, and he took her home and put her into bed and then tossed the gun into a drawer and sat by her bedside for a while, squeezing the armrests of a hastily-moved chair, watching her alien new form breathing contentedly and somehow loathing it with every fiber of his being.
Eventually exhaustion got the better of him. After he woke with a start some time later and nearly toppled the chair over, he dragged himself over to his bedroom. It was almost too early for bed, really, but he just wanted this fucking day to end. Maybe, hopefully, tomorrow he could actually think.
-------
He awoke again to hands shaking him. “Dave. Dave, wake up. We should check on the kids, see how they’re holding up.”
“Huh?” His brain was still the same sludge as the day before. Martha? What was she doing here? “What are you talking about?”
“Gabriel, the kidnapping. Wake up.”
“That was… that was yesterday,” he mumbled.
“And they’re probably still worried sick. Aren’t you?” She pulled his arm to drag him out of – no, he wasn’t in his bed, he was on the couch at the Kerrigans’ place. He blinked rapidly. A dream. It had all just been some fucked-up crazy dream.
Christ. He took a deep breath, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as Martha let go of him. “Jesus,” he muttered.
He stood up, inhaling and exhaling again, letting it all just fade into the haze of last night. Probably, hopefully, by lunchtime he wouldn’t even remember he’d dreamt anything. In the corner of the room, Cheryl nodded at him, leaning on the door to the girls’ room.
“Kids? Are you awake?”
Nothing. Dave shifted, glancing towards the windows, the drawn curtains, the light just squeezing past the edges. A strange unease crept slowly up his back, his pulse uncomfortably thick in his ears.
Lucy by the window. A pile of empty sleeping bags.
“Lucy? Where are the others?”
“They left. They’re going to save Gabriel. They took Dan and Martha’s car.”
Abruptly, Dave was swaying, nearly losing his balance before he managed to support himself against the wall. Cheryl whirled around as everyone looked at one another in horror. “You okay?”
“Sorry, just…” He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples for a moment. Fucking déjà vu. That was all it was, hypersensitive pattern-matching grabbing a vague memory of something kind of similar from the dream and insisting it was exactly the same. He’d… he’d probably heard them through his sleep when they’d left or something, and his brain had made up the rest. Fuck, it’d felt real, though. “I’ll… I’ll call Jean and talk some sense into them. Fuck.”
The others waited, silent, as he dug out his cellphone and dialed her number. In the dream, he remembered distinctly, he’d told the kids they were keeping Gabriel at the church, for some godforsaken reason. He sure as hell wasn’t doing that for real.
“Hi, Dad!” said Jean cheerfully.
“Jean, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? Get back here right now.”
“We’re saving Gabriel! We took the Harrisons’ car, and Katherine could totally drive it all the way over here! And Felicia can smell Gabriel, so we’re gonna go and torch all the bad guys!”
Even though he knew it was just déjà vu, it was still fucking disorienting. “Look, you’re not going to torch any bad guys. This isn’t a movie. You don’t even know where they are, and even if you did you’d all get yourselves killed. These are people with guns and you’re a bunch of fucking kids. Don’t be stupid. Come on home and we can figure this out.”
He heard disruption and then, suddenly, Jack’s voice. “What the hell else do you want us to do? Just leave him to die?”
“I mean, if you want to get into that, him dying is a fuckload better than him and all of you too.” Jack didn’t answer that one, probably rightly. Dave pressed his lips together. “Look, for all you know they don’t even have him anymore at this point. He could’ve gotten out. You’re planning to go endanger yourselves anyway for fucking nothing?”
Sure. In the dream, it was kind of a blur but he was pretty sure Gabriel had just… spontaneously developed fire powers and fucking straight-up murdered some guy. That definitely wasn’t happening, on multiple levels.
“My point is, if you try to play superheroes, you’re not going to be fine, because you’re not fucking superheroes. Just get the fuck back here, understand?”
There was a long silence on the other end. “All right,” Jack said at last. “Fine. We’ll come back.”
“Good, you’d better. And, uh…” This was incredibly dumb, but the image of the thing that Jean had become in that dream was still fucking unsettling. “By the way, you know you all shouldn’t touch evolution stones with your bare hands, right? For all we know it could make your organs explode out of your chest. Just… don’t do that.”
Jack paused. “What?”
“Never… never mind, just something I was thinking about. Just get home.”
And Jack hung up. Dave exhaled slowly as he lowered his phone. “They’re coming home,” he said. “It’s fine.”
-------
They didn’t come home. Somehow they managed to figure out who the kidnappers were and where they would be anyway (Dave had a horrible suspicion that Mia was involved), and they stormed the church.
Jean didn’t come out of it a misproportioned, furry mess; she came out of it in a body bag.
They were all dead when the ambulance got there, all of them except Mia who’d been shot in the back and had passed out from blood loss. Dave went with the Kerrigans to the hospital and sat there by her bed, drumming his fingers, restlessly watching Cheryl and Howard as they hugged each other close, pale and exhausted and weeping, like a cliché out of the latest inevitable award-bait tragedy-porn flick. Lucy had been standing by the bed for hours, silent, staring at her sister’s unconscious face, not moving.
“Why’d you let them go?” he asked when he couldn’t stand it anymore. Lucy turned slowly, blinking, but said nothing.
“Dave,” Cheryl said sharply.
“You’ve got… you can do more creepy Pokémon shit than any of them.” He waved a hand vaguely, voice shaking, anger boiling in his lungs. “Why’d you just watch them fucking go?”
“Dave,” Cheryl repeated, her voice icy. “Don’t take this out on her.”
Lucy backed away from him, eyes welling up with tears before she vanished into thin air. Cheryl sprang up, looking around, murmuring her name softly, but not before giving him a silent death glare. Howard sighed deeply, shaking his head with his face in his hands, so pathetic-looking that Dave almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
Dave exhaled, massaging his eyelids. Wasn’t like the functional eight-year-old could’ve done much anyway. What, like she should’ve rushed in there herself, gotten killed too? Fuck.
But it was no use saying sorry to empty air. Wouldn’t fix anything anyway, for her or anyone else.
Mia lay silent, unmoving in her bed, and Dave stared at her, fists clenched and shaking, until sometime, much later, he drifted off into some kind of sleep.
-------
“Dave. Dave, wake up.”
He started awake immediately, a strangled noise emerging from his throat, hands clutching at the sofa. Martha gave him a concerned, warily sympathetic look. “You all right?”
He just blinked. “We should check on the kids,” she went on. “See how they’re holding up.”
“I…” He stared at the others, standing in exactly the positions he remembered them. “Okay,” he croaked as he rose to his feet. Okay, okay, what the fuck. Science and rationality. Just pattern-matching, for fuck’s sake. For this kind of thing to mean anything, you’d have to predict what’d happen ahead of time. What did he remember of the dream, exactly? Cheryl had knocked on the door and said…
“Kids? Are you awake?”
A fluke. Just a couple of words. He struggled to pull up words, exact words, as she reached for the door handle. Lucy? Where are the others? That was what he remembered. They left. They’re going to save Gabriel. And now it’d be different, different words, different events, because –
“Lucy? Where are the others?”
“They left. They’re going to save Gabriel. They took Dan and Martha’s car.”
Dave’s ears rang as everything melted together, voices echoing incoherently as blood pounded in his ears. Before he knew it he’d turned, stormed out the door and slammed it behind him, glaring daggers at the gray, cloudy sky.
“You think this is funny, huh? Think this’ll make me come crawling back?” His voice shook with rage. “Well, why doesn’t every other motherfucker who loses his kids get a second fucking chance, huh? You couldn’t use your almighty fucking magic to tell your shitbag worshippers not to murder kids the first fucking time? You couldn’t spare one fucking second to cure malaria instead of fucking with me? Fuck you!”
The sky didn’t answer. Dave took a deep, agitated breath, then another.
Fuck. Whatever was really going on here, he wasn’t this far gone. He turned back to the house and grabbed the doorknob, but it didn’t turn.
Cheryl opened as soon as he knocked, giving him a look that said oh, Christ, she’d heard him, hadn’t she. “Never fucking mind,” he said, whirling back and making a beeline for his car.
He stepped into the driver’s seat, started the car and headed north before she could come out and stop him. He’d kill those motherfuckers himself if he had to. The drive was a blur; he wasn’t quite aware of himself until he’d parked somewhere by the side of the church, diagonally across at least two spaces, marched up to the door, and torn it open.
A man stood there, armed with a handgun, staring at him in surprise. “Murderous fuckers!” Dave snarled, raising his own gun.
His hand trembled as he aimed, jerked with the unfamiliar recoil, and the bullet shattered a stained-glass window. The next one hit, somewhere; the man jerked backwards and then swung his gun arm back around and pulled the trigger.
Something punched Dave in the lung. He blinked as something sharp stung in the wake of the punch, squeezed the trigger again and again as everything became warm and wet and he couldn’t breathe. The other man collapsed as the gun clicked uselessly. Dave tried to take a step forward only for the power to leave his legs, sending him crumpling to the floor.
The gun clattered against the stone; he tried to reach for it, but all he could see was his fingers twitching uselessly in a spreading pool of blood, and the other man further away, eyes glassy and frozen and staring unblinkingly back at him from a lifeless, blood-splattered face.
There was a strange, cold numbness spreading through him as he struggled to breathe, to squirm towards the gun. The more his lungs tried to pull in oxygen, the more the taste of blood rose in his throat. He tried to cough and everything hurt. This had been a really, really fucking stupid idea. Why’d he ever thought this’d fucking work? (Maybe he hadn’t, really.)
He coughed again, gurgling blood, a stab of pain shooting through the numbness. His racing heartbeat thumped deafeningly in his ears. God, why wouldn’t it just fucking end? The other guy stared lifelessly back at him, and Dave tried to savour the small victory of taking one of them down with him, but all he could feel was nausea and spreading, throbbing agony.
Somewhere in the distance, a door burst open. A scream – Katherine? Hands were shaking him, and he tried to tell them to go, just leave, but nothing happened. The last fuzzy thing he saw as the world began to fade, finally, was Mia’s face leaning down into his field of vision, frowning at him, like he’d just done something incredibly, incredibly dumb.
-------
And then he was back. He jerked awake, limbs flailing in Martha’s face as she tried to rouse him, his heart pounding, and sprang to his feet like the world’s most frazzled jack-in-the-box. He felt his chest – no holes, no blood, nothing – and only after staring at Martha’s baffled face for a moment did it properly sink in that it was that morning, again. It had rewound, again, and he wasn’t dead, and none of that had happened.
“You okay?” asked Cheryl.
“Yes. No. No! The kids are gone. They’re gone, off on a fucking suicide mission, again. Fuck!” He clutched his hair, fingers digging into his skull.
“What?” said Martha, skeptical; Cheryl ran to the girls’ room and opened it, gasping in shock.
“They went to save Gabriel,” Lucy said, and Dave marched into the room, grabbing her by the shoulders.
“Lucy. How do I fix it?”
She blinked at him in confusion. He shook her shoulders. “Lucy, I swear to fucking God, if you don’t tell me what’s going on and how I save them –”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Cheryl tore him away from Lucy with unexpected force, holding his arm in a painful grip, and Dave swayed on his feet.
“Ow, let me go, I just –”
“Not until you tell me what the fuck is going on and leave my daughter alone.” He stared at her, and she stared back, her gaze deadly firm. He’d never seen her quite this angry, and that sobered him a bit. He took a breath, his arm throbbing.
“Okay. Okay. Look, I’m… I’m stuck in a fucking loop. It was this same day yesterday, and the day before that. I know what happens. They go there and then they fucking die. Fuck!”
Cheryl glanced around silently. “Dave,” she said, loosening her grip on him slightly but not letting him go. “I think you should probably get a bit more rest.”
The others nodded in silent agreement. Dave stared wildly at them and opened his mouth, then closed it again. Yeah. He sounded like a fucking lunatic. Really, he would’ve been fucking worried if they had believed him.
“Okay,” he said and took a deep breath. “Yeah. I just… I’m just going to lie down and think for a bit.”
Cheryl didn’t let go of his arm until he’d laid himself back down onto the sofa. He pressed his hands against his eyelids, trying to soothe his pulsing headache, and tried not to listen to the others as they made phone calls and agitated arguments.
The first thing that flew into his head was to just walk out right now, drive to the nearest shooting range, practice until they closed, and then go to sleep, rinse and repeat, until he could waltz in there like a fucking action hero and dispose of the fuckers. Hell, apparently, if he failed he could just try again. Easy. Why not?
And yet, he didn’t move. His throat tightened with blood that wasn’t there, a coppery smell in his nostrils, quickening heartbeat thumping in his ears, lifeless, glassy eyes staring back and nausea rising in the back of his mouth, and he stayed rooted to the couch.
What the fuck kind of plan would that be, anyway? Save them, and then get arrested and tried for a fucking mass shooting in a church? Imagine the goddamn headlines.
It had to be possible to fix this. Somehow, he could make them turn back. And he had… his stomach did a queasy flip, but he could probably experiment. It’d all be reset anyway. He could do one thing, see what the consequences were, then do something else next time. It was a perfect setup, wasn’t it? Infinite replication with all variables identical, except for whatever he chose to change?
He started to sit up, but Cheryl pushed him back down. “I think you should stay there and let us handle this,” she said firmly.
Okay. Perhaps this wasn’t the best starting point. But that was fine. He had time. This was fine.
-------
The first thing he tried was to just not do anything. Sharon instead called Jack and tried to talk him out of it. Again, he promised they’d come back, but they didn’t. The outcome was the same as the first time, more or less: Jean returning home after touching a Fire Stone, Will and Mia dead.
For the next few goes, he tried calling Jean and saying different things. “Letting slip” that Gabriel was being held in a warehouse on the other side of town. They saw through it – Mia saw through it – and the same thing happened. Any time he warned Jean off the Fire Stone, everything somehow turned out worse.
Just taking a nap wasn’t enough to fast-forward to the next iteration. As best he could tell, after a few goes, it looped over at six AM. If he was awake by then, he’d just blink and find himself waking up on the sofa again. He restlessly accompanied the others to hospitals, nauseous as he identified Mia’s body for the fifth or sixth time, waiting to just get to sleep already so he could try again.
It crept up on him, finally, as he sat by Mia’s bedside once again, agitatedly trying to fall asleep on the hard chair, that technically he had a much quicker way to reset.
Yeah. Why not? He’d already died once. Be way fucking easier. He’d read enough at one point or another to not bungle it, to know where to shoot. Really it was a no-brainer.
He didn’t move. The bile in the back of his throat tasted of blood.
His gaze slid over to Mia, injured but alive this time around – not that it mattered, not that anything mattered when it’d all be erased in a few hours. She would tell him there was no reason not to, that he was just wasting his own time sitting here, trying to sleep in the world’s most uncomfortable chair. What was he even waiting for?
He stood up. Cheryl looked up at him, questioning. He pointed vaguely towards the restrooms. “I’m just…”
She nodded absently, looked away again.
Dave headed for the nearest bathroom, mouth dry, and the instant he’d closed and locked the door behind him, he was hit with a flash of intense nausea and only just managed to throw open the toilet and collapse in front of it before he was throwing up bile.
By the time he finally had control of himself and his stomach had settled into a dull, passive ache, he was shaking. He pushed himself weakly to his feet, rinsed out his mouth in the sink and then rose up again in front of the mirror, supporting himself on the brim of the sink. (God, he looked like shit.)
He pulled the gun out from under his belt and lifted it to his temple. His hand trembled in the mirror, and he squeezed his eyes shut. Willed himself to pull the trigger. Nothing happened.
This was dumb. Just fucking do it. He wouldn’t even actually die, for fuck’s sake.
Nothing. Why the fuck should he even care? They’d all just pop out of existence in a few hours anyway, gone like everything else.
Or would they? Was it the world that was looping, or just him? Would everything be erased, or would he be spawning an entire fucking alternate timeline where Howard and Cheryl watched him go in and lock the door, and then heard a bang, and would be left trying to explain to Mia when she woke up why he’d suddenly blown his brains out in a hospital bathroom?
(Worse, they probably wouldn’t even think it was that inexplicable, would they. Most of the kids were fucking dead. They’d just figure—)
There was an abrupt knock on the door, and he jumped, lowering the gun quickly, like a kid caught playing with something he shouldn’t.
“Dave?” It was Cheryl, of course it was. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“Do you need anything?” Her voice was exhausted.
“No.” Goddamn it. Why was she there, acting like she cared?
“It’s going to… We’ll get through this. I know that’s easy for us to say, our girls are still…” She trailed off with a heavy sigh. “I can only imagine what you’re going through right now. But they need you. Mia needs you. And we’re… here for you.”
What the actual fuck did she think he was doing in here. “Look, I don’t…”
“I know that’s not something you want to hear, but maybe you should hear it anyway. I just… I’m so sorry about Jean.”
His fingers clenched around the handle of the gun. He heard a soft thump and a slide, like she’d just sat down against the wall outside.
“I just keep replaying it all in my head, wondering if there was anything we could have done,” she said, quieter, only barely audible through the door.
Yeah. That’s what I’m doing too, with my new time-travel powers. He imagined opening the door, telling her that and raising the gun again. Just seeing the look on her face before pulling the trigger. Why not? It’d all be reset. Even if it spawned an alternate timeline, wasn’t like he’d have to fucking live in it.
He stood and squeezed the gun, jaw clenched.
Fuck.
Slowly, he put the safety back on and stuffed it back under his belt.
“Still there?” she said on the other side.
“There’s only one door. Do the math.” He sank down by the door and rubbed at his face. He was so fucking tired. Maybe it’d be easier to fall asleep in here than on that goddamn chair.
There was a pause. “You don’t have to deal with this alone,” she said.
“Great. Thanks. Eagerly awaiting your bright ideas on resurrection.”
She let out a long, exhausted sigh. A few seconds passed in silence before there was a shuffling of fabric as she stood up again. “Can’t say I didn’t try.”
Dave flopped his head against the door behind him and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for sleep to come.
-------
“Hey. Jean? Where are you?”
“We’re saving Gabriel! We took Dan and Martha’s car and—”
“Look, it’s… it’s okay. You don’t have to do this. They just rescued Gabriel. He’s safe with the police. They just called to let us know.”
“Really?” Jean gasped over the phone. There was a little note of disappointment behind the relief in her voice. God, Jean.
The others were staring at him, faces shocked. Bill looked angry. Sure, let’s hear his genius idea. Their kids about to get slaughtered by a bunch of gun-wielding lunatics, and what, they were going to get on his case for fucking lying to them? Let them relive this day in a fucking loop, see what they came up with.
He heard indistinctly as Jean relayed the message to the others. There was a crackling as Jack took the phone, as usual.
“You sure? He’s safe?”
“Yeah. It’s all right, everything’s fine.”
“Weren’t you saying last night that probably some of them are in the police? How can you be sure they aren’t just saying they rescued him to stop us trying anything? Or that, that he’s even safe in their custody? When can he come home?”
Fuck. Had he said that to them? It’d been weeks by this point. “I called around, guy I know knew an officer he trusted, they put a team together. It’s fine.”
“It’s…” Jack hesitated. God, let him please just buy it, or he’d have to do a whole other iteration just to figure out a better fucking lie. “He’s really okay?”
“He’s fine.”
There was no way to tell whether Jack really believed him. The previous times he’d sure also made it sound like yeah, they’d be coming back, only to not do it. Dave paced, and drank half a bottle of scotch, and tried to tune out the others’ conversation about whether this was right and what they could possibly tell them when they got there, until the doorbell rang.
He held Jean, okay and fine and normal, for a long time, and didn’t have the voice to say anything at all.
Mia was looking at him intently from where she stood, and he half-expected her to bust out one of her sudden inspired deductions about everything based on the exact rate of his pulse or the contraction of his pupils or whatever the fuck. Instead, it was Jack who first asked about Gabriel and Bill who told him he was still at the church and always had been.
Jack stared at Dave mutely for a moment. Then he screamed and lunged. Dave let go of Jean, shoving her out of the way just before Jack’s fist barreled into his stomach. He staggered backward, wind knocked out of him, and before he could do anything at all, Jack’s antennae lit up with electricity and swung into his shoulder. His muscles seized up, everything cramping, and he hit the floor hard, teeth clamping down on the edge of his tongue.
“You fucked-up asshole,” Jack snarled, voice breaking, struggling as his parents pulled him back. “They’re going to kill him and you don’t even care!”
Dave tried to breathe through his nose as his mouth filled with blood, body locked in a fetal position, every muscle in his body simultaneously on fire. Cheryl and Dan were rushing to check on him, but all he could do was grunt vaguely. Jean watched with tears in her eyes, as betrayed as the rest.
Of course Jack wanted to head out again, but at least his parents were firm that that had never been a good idea and wouldn’t help anyone, and they sure as hell weren’t leaving him alone to rally the others again. Instead, Jack insisted they actually do what Dave’d said he’d done – call around, find a trustworthy connection with the police.
Dave sat on the sofa, silent, arms folded, glaring at nothing, with another glass of scotch. Yeah. Maybe they should’ve just done that in the first fucking place.
He downed the rest of the glass as the others made phone calls. His tongue was still aching and uncomfortable in his mouth, the cut stinging at the alcohol. Who the fuck would he have called anyway? But eventually someone bit and said they’d be looking into it.
They waited, and waited. Eventually Jean exhaustedly joined him on the couch, sniffling, curling up against him, and he put his arm around her and pulled her close.
He dozed off like that, eventually, after a long, long time, until he started awake at his phone buzzing in his pocket and fumbled to answer it.
“Hello, David Ambrose.”
The same voice from yesterday (weeks ago), laced with smug malice. Ice shot through his veins, evaporating the exhaustion out of his brain.
“Let him go,” he growled.
“Unfortunately you didn’t hold up your end of the deal. You know what that means.”
Fuck. Fuck. How the fuck had he even known? “The fuck are you talking about?”
“You know perfectly well.” There were faint sounds of movement from the other end of the phone, the opening of a door, footsteps. “Did you know, he was trying to escape earlier today? We had to tie him up.”
Dave pressed the phone to his ear, heartbeat thundering in his head. “Let him go, you piece of shit.” His voice was shaky and unconvincing. “Look, we can—”
Another door opened, and suddenly he could hear a muffled scream. “Say goodbye. There will be a next time. Remember this then.”
“Hello?” came Gabriel’s voice, panicked as whatever had covered his mouth was removed. “Help! Someone, please, he’s—”
There was a gunshot, and then dead silence.
“Gabriel?” The other end hung up. His phone slid uselessly out of his grip.
Jean clutched his shoulder, sobbing quietly. Why’d they even tried? Fuckers. He’d always known this was a bad idea. Why’d he even fucking let them? Wordlessly, he pulled Jean close and squeezed her tightly.
Wasn’t this basically the ideal outcome, anyway, the one he’d been trying for? Only one fucking dead kid, Jean alive and well? Maybe with that achieved, the loop would break and they could all move on with their lives.
There was an icy pit in his stomach that wouldn’t go away.
“S-shouldn’t we tell the others?” Jean murmured.
He took a deep, sickening breath. “Yeah. I’m… Hold on.”
He let go of her, gently, and rose up, stumbling into the kitchen. He’d expected it to be empty, but Mia was standing there, hand in a bag of beef jerky. Alive and well, too.
“I was hungry,” she said.
“They shot Gabriel,” he said, his voice shaking uselessly.
Mia nodded. “They said they would do that.”
“How did they even fucking know? I just…”
“You said they rigged a Gardevoir test. Maybe they’re using Psychic Pokémon.”
Maybe. Did it even fucking matter? Just one more thing that didn’t work, because nothing worked.
“Hey, Mia.” He found the bottle of scotch, poured out another glass with trembling hands. “Say you could go back in time and just redo something. Do it better. What do you do?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You can’t do that.”
He waved a hand. “Hypothetically imagine it, okay. Just, humour me for a moment.”
“Can I only go back once, or many times?”
He raised an eyebrow. “As many times as it takes.” And what, then it’d stop? Who said it would? Maybe he’d save them all, do everything perfectly, and it’d just fucking reset itself again and undo it. His personal Hell, forever. Maybe that was what this was.
He downed the glass as Mia thought about it, the cut on his tongue burning, and started to pour out another.
“If I didn’t do something right the first time, it’s because I didn’t know all the information to do it right,” she said. “So once I know what happens, I have the information. Maybe something changes when I do it again, but it’s only going to take a few tries.”
“Well, what if the thing you’re trying to get right isn’t even really about something you did, it’s other people. How do you convince them to not do what you know is going to be a goddamn disaster, when nobody’s going to believe you’re a fucking time-traveler who knows the future?”
Mia frowned. “You could prove that you know things you couldn’t know. They should listen if they’re smart. But people are weird.”
Huh. Dave swirled the drink in his glass for a moment. “Yeah. That’s a good point.”
He finished the glass and went rummaging through the cupboards for more alcohol.
-------
Dave woke on the sofa again with his head pounding and just wanted to go back to sleep for at least another fifty years.
He waved Martha away vaguely, couldn’t get his eyes to do anything but stare at the curtains. She gave up and went to check on the kids. Gabriel’s scream and the gunshot that cut it off into silence echoed in his ears under the sickening slow thump of his pulse in his temples.
He told himself to get up and call Mia, but his body was made of lead, the thought floating vaguely by without doing anything. What would it actually accomplish, anyway? The universe would just find some new way to twist the knife. Maybe his next intervention would just kill a different one. Maybe he’d save them all and then a fucking cartoon piano would fall on Jean, just to spite him.
The others tried to get a response out of him, but not for very long; they had better things to think about. As they began to call around, the same insufferable panicked voices clamoring obliviously for the twentieth time, Dave realized there was no fucking point.
He pulled out the gun. When someone screamed his name, he was already squeezing the trigger.
Maybe, he managed to think before the bang, this was how to get out of it all along. Maybe this was just it, and it’d be over.
And then, he was back on the sofa.
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), but the impulse is there, and I love how Dave can at times have a curious and experimental mindset towards his situation, for all the awful emotion it carries with it.
