Normal Timeline
The usual happens. He wakes up in a coffin surrounded by letters for someone he doesn’t know, get found by a talking cat and be led to a town to stay in for the night—one which will start a hunt for mysteries with a lot of missing cases yet no walking murderers. The one responsible for taking away people is a giant clock tower in the heart of the town looking down on them so he has to shut it down.
The Start of Every Timeloop
The usual happens, except the clock is no longer moving as if time has stood still. The story still plays out as normal, he gets found and gets taken in. However, one quick glance at the mirror and the difference is clear—his head is replaced by the same clock he sought to rid of. The hands is all over the place—couldn’t tell which is the hour hand and which is the minute hand, the position are impossible to replicate on a normal clock unless you manually moved it. (Which could be a bad idea…)
Perhaps, this isn’t the usual anymore. Having to walk on his waking days with a head he so loathed. Nubella often needing to pick him up from time to time because he’d often get caught up in his head, he couldn’t even tell if his strolls led him further away from home.
But soon he won’t be there to come pick him up. It’s the time he’d run through a dense forest to check on him after several unanswered calls. To see the closest friend he’s ever been with get shattered into a million pieces, it too felt shattering inside. A trigger for another reset.
Time and time again, for every death and every tear, for every reason for a reset, this wish is granted. Despite this power and all the choices he can undo, he still couldn’t save his friend from his fateful demise. Time is his dominion but fate is not. However, he’s still stubborn as he could ever be.
But much like a tree with a hard trunk or a large boulder, everything withers and so is his belief of never moving on. He’d reach the day of accepting the death of not his own and it would’ve still hurt as of the first time and much more than the gunshot he took from a friend. He’d spend his days sulking in his manor, pondering all of his decisions.
“Maybe I should go outside?” He asked himself, the silence nodding to his request. Outside is empty, the town already gone from all the resets. The only chatters are the howling of the wind and the crunch of the deep-layered snow.
Except this time, he’ll hear the first hello. Or atleast a sign someone is there, a computer popup greeting him with a advertisement only to see more plastered across the skies. It’s a immediate sign that something is wrong with The Needle. What he assumes to be people messing around the tall rod, all he could find is a confused man with a head of a really beaten up computer head.
(This is a really old story, newer ones are posted in Ao3)
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