Chapter Text
The first time it happened, he thought it was trauma.
The third time, he decided it was hell.
And by the fifth time waking up flat on his back in that goddamn forest, ribs screaming, Enid Sinclair’s claws pinning him to the dirt with all the righteous fury of a Hallmark werewolf, Tyler Galpin began to wonder if maybe the universe was just a very committed sadist .
He’d lie there, breath hitching, hot blood soaking his shirt, watching her huff and growl, those wide golden eyes full of pity he didn’t want. Then the same sequence: she’d back off, some self-satisfied friend group member would shout something moralistic, and Tyler would limp away.
The night would smear into the day, the day would lurch into the inevitable. And by sunset, Marilyn Thornhill’s perfume would curl into his nose before the sack went over his head.
Chains. Damp cave floor. Her voice in his mind as she tried to force an unnatural bond between them.
Every time.
No matter what he tried.
Fighting harder against Enid, running deeper into the woods, even throwing himself into the ravine, it always ended with Thornhill’s smug face and the click of metal against his neck, wrists and ankles.
Loop.
Loop.
Loop .
Until unlucky cycle thirteen, when something shifted. Maybe he stopped caring about survival and started caring about fun .
She leaned in, voice full of false sympathy. “You poor thing. No one ever -”
He yanked the right chain. Hard. It was loose. huh .
One moment she was blinking at him in surprise, the next, she was gagging on her own breath because the cuff was around her throat instead.
“Yeah, yeah,” Tyler drawled, twisting until her eyes bulged. “I’m the tragic little monster who just needed love. I’ve heard the speech, Marilyn. It was boring the first twelve times.”
Her nails raked at his hands and arm. He didn’t stop. The part of him that used to care about right and wrong was long dead. Rotting in the loops before. What remained was hungry. Curious.
He didn’t just strangle her. He worked at it, dragged her down, felt cartilage grind and her spine creak. When she finally went still, he kept going, just to be sure the loop couldn’t cheat him.
When he finally let go, he was panting. Sweating. Sticky.
And alone.
No reset. No Enid . No forest. Just Marilyn Thornhill, face slack on the cave floor. Torchlight flickering her horrified expression.
“…Huh,” Tyler muttered, flexing his fingers. “Either a dream… or I just got tenure in Hell.”
He stood slack against the stone wall for a long moment, waiting for the world to flicker, to drag him back.
It didn’t.
Tyler laughed, “Well,” he said, voice echoing, “I suppose I should send Enid a thank-you card.”
He expected the air to shimmer, the floorboards to soften under him, his vision to blur into the familiar forest clearing.
But the chain in his hand stayed cold. Blood on his shirt stayed tacky. And Marilyn Thornhill stayed gloriously, irreversibly dead.
Tyler slipped out of her lair like a guilty thought, keeping to the shadows. The night air hit him in the face—sharp, wet with rain, so real it made his teeth ache. Every step home was an exercise in disbelief.
He kept glancing over his shoulder, waiting to be yanked back into the loop. It didn’t come. The streets were empty, the houses dark. It was anticlimactic.
By the time he reached the back porch of his house, his hands were stiff with dried blood, knuckles raw. His reflection in the glass door looked like something dragged out of a ditch. Eyes wide and feral, shirt ripped, smudges of Marilyn’s life smeared down his neck.
For a moment, he stood there, watching himself breathe. Still here. No howling wolf-girl, no smiling teacher, no fucking chains. And no Wednesday with her goddamn tasers.
He pushed the door open and stepped into the dark kitchen. Elvis padded over immediately, paws clicking against tile, bumping a wet nose into Tyler’s knuckles and licking the tacky blood off them.
“…Huh,” he whispered again.
He half expected his Dad to walk in, badge flashing, eyes full of the kind of disappointment only a Galpin could weaponize. But the house stayed still. Low murmuring voices of the tv in the other room, the dull gravely snores of his Dad.
Only the low drone of the TV murmured from the living room, blending with his Dad’s gravelly snores.
Tyler stumbled upstairs, careful not to leave muddy streaks behind. In the bathroom, he shoved Elvis out with a muttered, “No, boy,” before flicking on the light.
And stared. The blood wasn’t just on his shirt. It had spattered across his jaw, into his hairline. Thornhill’s blood. The loop never let him keep souvenirs before.
He leaned on the sink and let out a slow, incredulous laugh.
“This is insane,” he told his reflection, voice shaking. “I actually… did it.”
The kid in the mirror smiled back. It wasn’t a nice smile.
Water roared into the basin as he scrubbed his hands, watching red swirl down the drain. No flicker. No reset. Just the satisfying sting of skin rubbed raw.
He stripped, showered, dried off. Then waited again—for the snap, the pull, the rewind.
Nothing happened.
He stood in the bathroom doorway for a long time, muscles taut, eyelids heavy. Elvis sat patiently at his feet.
“Guess I’m gonna have to start figuring out what the hell to do now,” he muttered to the dog.
He was free. Of Thornhill. He could be just another ordinary, normie teenager again.
…Fuck. He had therapy tomorrow, didn’t he.
Morning came too easily. That alone felt like an omen.
Tyler woke up to sunlight bleeding through his curtains and Elvis hogging the foot of his bed.
For the first five minutes, he laid perfectly still, waiting. Any second now, the air would split open and drag him back to the cave floor. Chained and tethered to Thornhill.
It didn’t.
So, he showered, brushed his teeth. Put on a hoodie and ignored how his hands still trembled with the memory of Marilyn’s throat collapsing under them.
Therapy’s going to love that little anecdote.
By the time he slid into the leather chair across from his therapist after a quiet drive with his Dad, he was buzzing like a kid who’d gotten away with something and daring the world to catch him.
Dr. Kinbott adjusted her glasses, clipboard balanced on her knees. “Rough week?”
Tyler huffed a laugh. Understatement of the century. “You could say that.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
His first instinct was to grin and say Sure, doc. I murdered my kidnapper in a basement finally, progress, right?
Instead, he slouched deeper into the chair, eyes tracing the diplomas on the wall. “Had a nightmare. Same one. Over and over.”
Her pen scratched. “Recurring dreams can be a sign of unresolved trauma.”
“No kidding.”
“Did the nightmare change at all?”
Tyler tilted his head. A smile tugged at his mouth. “…Yeah. This time I woke up.”
She nodded. “That’s good, Tyler. That means your subconscious may be processing what happened.”
He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing out loud. Processing. Yeah, that was one word for it.
She kept talking while Tyler studied the little plant on her desk, reminded of Marilyn. He half-expected her face to glitch, her body to flicker, the loop to yank him back mid-sentence.
But the clock ticked on. The world didn’t reset.
When the session ended, she gave him the usual smile. “Well, you’re making progress, Tyler. I can see it.”
He walked out, hands stuffed deep in his hoodie pocket, stepped onto the pavement and froze.
His Dad was standing on the pavement. Uniform rumpled, dark circles carved under his eyes, two paper cups of coffee in hand. Ones from where Tyler worked.
His Dad’s gaze flicked up, landing on him like a searchlight. “Thought I’d catch you,” he said, holding out one of the cups. “Figured you’d want something hot.”
Tyler’s fingers itched. Warm against his raw knuckles. His Dad eyed the split skin, not saying anything was worse than anything at all.
“…Thanks,” he muttered, cautious, like the coffee might bite him.
They stood in silence for a beat, steam curling into the chill air.
“You been sleeping?” his Dad asked. Tone was neutral, but Tyler heard the strain under it.
“Yeah. Here and there.” He sipped.
His Dad didn’t press, just walked beside him toward the sheriff car. The normalcy of it scraped at Tyler’s nerves worse than chains. For eleven loops he had wanted this, mundane silence, the possibility of being just a kid again.
“Therapist say anything helpful?” the Sheriff asked, starting the car.
Tyler barked out a laugh before he could stop himself. “Yeah. She said I’m making progress.”
His Dad glanced at him, eyebrows lifting. “And?”
Tyler smirked into his coffee. “Guess I am. I think.”
“That’s good to hear.”
The car eased out of the parking spot, slipping back onto the road like nothing in the world had changed. As if the rest of the day would fall neatly into place: his Dad dropping him off, Tyler grinding through the motions of homeschooling and self-study, “healing” under the polite label of grief therapy.
Later that evening, his Dad would come home, set down his badge and his gun, and bring up the idea of Tyler returning to high school. One more brick in the careful wall of normalcy they were both pretending to build.
Routine. Safe. Ordinary. Free of Thornhill.
Tyler stared out the window, took a slow breath, and wondered, again…what the hell he was supposed to do with all this freedom.
The hiss of the espresso machine had settled into a steady backdrop for the low chitter of conversation. Grind, tamp, pull. Orders stacked up as more bodies pressed in, the coffee shop now doubling as a staging ground for search parties.
Through the glass, Tyler caught the warble of his Dad's voice over a loudspeaker, calling for another group to assemble. His jaw clenched, a knot pulling tight in his gut.
Nobody had found Thornhill yet, having been only a day since she ‘went missing’, but if they did, if someone stumbled on that cave, those chains…there’d be questions.
Ugly ones.
Tyler wiped down the counter, smile pasted on. He should probably eat her corpse tonight. Tie up loose ends. Better that than leaving a half-finished project lying around.
“Excuse me,” a sharp voice cut through the haze. One of the locals leaned over the till, impatience radiating. “I need my espresso.”
Tyler blinked, then smirked faintly. I would probably eat him too if I could.
“Coming up!” he chirped.
That night, the house was still. His Dad’s snores rumbled through the walls, Elvis curled warm at the foot of Tyler’s bed.
Tyler slid out from under the sheets and pulled a hoodie tight over his head and hiking boots on.
The rain had eased, leaving the streets slick and gleaming under the streetlights. He cut through alleys, backroads, a familiar ache in his stomach gnawing greater every step. He hadn’t lied to himself earlier. Thornhill’s corpse wasn’t just evidence. It was dinner.
Was that a Hyde thing? Or was that just him being sick in the head?
Either way, Thornhill was going bye bye tonight.
The thought made him laugh under his breath.
He was two blocks away and slipping deep into the forest when voices reached him. Lanterns bobbed up ahead, weaving through the trees.
“…spread out, check near the creek -”
Tyler froze, crouching low in the bushes. A search party. Not just locals. Black coats, purple flashes of Nevermore insignia. And in the midst of the pack was a familiar face; Xavier Thorpe.
Oh .
Tyler bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper.
If they kept going that way, they’d find her. The chains. The cave. His blood stamped across it all like a goddamn signature.
Why now ?
What the hell were Nevermore kids doing out here unsupervised? Midnight manhunt club? The whole scene reeked of Wednesday’s kind of scheming, but she wasn’t here yet.
Which meant the little bastards were improvising.
One of them stopped, head cocking, nostrils flaring.
“What is it?” asked another, a beanie tugged low over his ears.
“…Coffee beans?” the sniffer muttered, frowning into the dark. Must be a werewolf.
“Yeah, real suspicious,” a girl drawled. “Let’s keep moving.”
“It’s suspicious when we’re in the middle of fuck-knows-where,” sniffer snapped through a whisper. “Look, I like Miss Thornhill, but I don’t want to get killed searching for her.”
“Look, I like Miss Thornhill, but I don’t want to get killed searching for her.”
“The Nightshades protect the school,” the girl shot back. “Which means we find the missing normie teacher before a mob of pitchfork-wielding yokels shows up accusing us of killing and eating her.”
“Why do normies always think we eat people?” one of them muttered.
…Well .
Tyler crouched lower, swallowing a wince.
“It’s getting stronger,” the sniffer grumbled, pressing a hand to their nose. “Damn it. I can’t focus on her scent.”
“Then focus harder,” the girl snapped, swinging her lantern toward him.
“I am , Bianca!”
“Guys,” Xavier sighed, stepping between them, “chill. Let’s try to get some distance from the coffee smell, yeah?”
“That might help,” the sniffer muttered, shrugging and heading off in a random direction. Bianca shot Xavier a look, scoffed, and followed.
Xavier lingered for a moment, eyes tilting toward the sky as if seeking divine patience, before finally trailing after them.
Tyler crouched in the bushes for a long, tense beat, then darted toward the caves.