Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2025-04-18 05:20 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2025-04-18 05:20 pm
Fanfiction: we're not going to do better next time (The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, Andrew/Ashley)
It's absolutely horrible fanfiction time!
If anyone prefers to read on AO3, I should mention that you won't currently find this on my AO3 account, because I've posted it anonymously for now; it's over here.
I've chosen to post this anonymously at first because, uh, I was recently interviewed about fanfiction for a newspaper article. I don't know whether I'll actually end up getting mentioned in the final article, but, if I am, I don't want unsuspecting newspaper readers to wander over to my AO3 account and discover this as the most recent fic on it; it's a little intense!
Particularly sharp-eyed readers may note that I've given the first warden a gun, when only the second warden had one in canon. This is because I can do what I want and you can't stop me.
Title: we're not going to do better next time
Fandom: The Coffin of Andy and Leyley
Rating: 16
Pairing: Andrew/Ashley
Wordcount: 2,700
Summary: Andrew is caught in a time loop. Infinite chances to get this right. It doesn't help.
Warnings: Sibling incest, (temporary) suicide, abuse, allusions to sexual assault, generally kind of fucked up.
Andrew distinctly remembers getting shot extremely fucking dead.
It really doesn’t seem like he should be able to remember that.
He opens his eyes.
This is—
This is their apartment. He’s in his own bed, staring up at the ancient glow-in-the-dark stars Leyley insisted on when they were kids.
Their supposedly burned-down apartment.
That can’t be right.
Did it not burn down? He’s seen the smouldering wreckage on the news; maybe that was a different building?
Did someone reconstruct the building, for some reason? Down to the glow-in-the-dark stars? Unlikely.
And, in either case, there’s a further problem. He does not remember coming back to their apartment block, or to some weird duplicate. What he remembers is getting gunned down by cops in a campsite.
Ashley is in her own bed across the room, sprawled face-down. He’s spent a lot of time watching her sleep; it’s a familiar position that really doesn’t look like it can be comfortable. So she’s here as well, at least. How?
He’s starving, he realises, suddenly. An intense, pervasive ache, a gnawing he’s pretty much learnt to tune out.
But he’s been eating: not enough, maybe, on the run with limited funds, but enough to take the worst of the edge off. He hasn’t felt hunger like this since...
Well. Since they were both trapped in their apartment.
-
Everything’s exactly the same as it was. The news broadcasts are familiar; the date on them is impossible. The wardens they killed are alive and well. The neighbour they ate is still playing deafening music.
It was a vision, Andrew concludes. Everything since they left the apartment, it was all a weirdly intense premonition of the future. Just like Ashley’s vision of Andrew cutting her throat.
(It’s something he’s been picturing kind of a lot, ever since she mentioned it.)
The fact that they don’t yet have the talisman does kind of throw a wrench in his theory. How could it have given them a vision before Ashley even got it?
But what else could it have been?
One way or another, Andrew is back here, and he knows the future. He can do better this time.
-
“Hey,” Andrew says. “When the warden comes to check up on us, let’s just not answer. Maybe he’ll unlock the door to see if we’re still in here.”
“Ooh,” Ashley says. “And then what? Kitchen knives?”
“I was thinking more of sneaking out the door while he’s checking the bathroom.” If they can get out of here without any crimes, without the cannibalism, without sacrificing anyone’s souls to possibly-demons, maybe they’ll be able to create some kind of halfway normal life.
It feels like he’s kidding himself. But they might as well try.
In the end, they don’t make it far enough to try at all. Andrew gets spotted while he’s making for the door, takes a bullet to the skull, wakes up back in his bed.
Okay. What the fuck?
-
Time loops. Okay. Why the fuck not?
For the next few loops, Andrew follows the same steps that got them out of the apartment block the first time. Means they end up leaving some bodies behind, and that Ashley has troubling ties to some kind of maybe-demonic entity, but at least he knows it works.
And then everything gets fucked up, one way or another, and he wakes up back in the apartment.
One loop he tries being a nice guy for once, knocks on their neighbour’s window to warn him, if he goes through with this summoning ritual, he’s going to end up dead. It doesn’t get Andrew any thanks, just a lot of ‘what are you doing on my balcony?’ and ‘oh, noooo, of course I’m not trying to summon horrific entities beyond our understanding.’
And then he and Ashley end up starving to death in their apartment, listening to the meal that could have saved them carrying on with his fucking useless life next door.
He doesn’t bother trying that again.
-
Andrew prepares himself for his first attempt to tell Ashley about the time loop. Spends the loop’s first hour leaning against the balcony railing, looking down. Trying to memorise every person passing below, every bird that flits past his vision, every one of Ashley’s increasingly pissed-off demands to hang out with her. At the end, he vaults over the railing, wakes up back at the start, heads out to the balcony again.
He does that over and over, until he’s confident he remembers it. Ashley might not believe him at first, but how else is she going to explain the fact that he knows all of that?
She believes him straight away. The whole thing was a waste of fucking time.
-
One time, he doesn’t kill the warden who discovers Ashley in the closet straight away. Just stands there, watching, waiting to see what happens.
What happens is that his sister gets shot dead. What was he expecting?
He takes his time killing the warden. Staring into Ashley’s dead eyes for every drawn-out second of it. When the warden eventually stops breathing, Andrew’s harder than he’s ever been.
He pulls himself off, his back up against the blood-spattered inner wall of the closet, before he throws himself off the balcony. No sense wasting it.
-
“Do you know how I feel about you?” Andrew asks, quietly, into the darkness. They’re lying in the same shitty motel bed they’ve shared in twenty other loops, Ashley warm in his arms.
It’s safe to ask, right? Sooner or later, this loop will crash and burn like all the others, and the next loop’s Ashley won’t remember. He’ll never have said it.
Ashley gives an affected gasp. “Why, my dearest brother, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, my fucking God.” He tries to scramble out of her grasp, but she tightens her arms around him. Fuck!
“You’ve just been sooooo subtle.”
Andrew buries his face in her shoulder, his ears burning. “Fuck you.”
Ashley laughs. “Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Well, apparently he knows how this loop is going to end: he’s going to die of fucking embarrassment.
-
He genuinely tries, most loops. It still goes to shit, every time. If they don’t get out of the apartment, they’ll starve. There’s no way out that doesn’t involve killing the wardens, not that he’s found, and in either case they’d still have the parasite conspiracy breathing down their necks. So they’ll always end up on the run together, and they will always, always fuck things up.
Sometimes he takes a loop off from trying. Fucks things up on purpose, just for a change, just for a little stress relief. He deserves that much, right?
He locks Ashley in the trunk of the car and drives them both off the bridge into the river. The reality of it doesn’t feel as good as the fantasy.
He swerves into oncoming traffic and doesn’t even fucking die straight away. It ends up taking two days of agony, gagged and bound to a hospital bed, because it turns out hospital staff really don’t like it when you beg them to kill you. Ashley died on impact, the bitch, so he doesn’t even have company.
Kind of puts him off any more fucking around with the car.
-
Maybe the only route to a good outcome is for them to split up. Live their own separate lives.
Ashley won’t let him leave. If he tests her enough, though, maybe he’ll find her breaking point, the thing that’ll make her walk away from him at last. It’d probably be better for both of them.
Maybe that’s just what he tells himself to feel better about the fact that he’s beaten her to shit again.
It’s all going to get reset anyway. Who cares?
-
“I’m in a time loop,” Andrew says. “I have infinite chances. Why the fuck can’t I get a good goddamn outcome?”
He knows why not. It’s because he’s stuck with this bitch. No matter how hard he works to keep them safe, she’ll fuck it up somehow; she’ll kill the wrong person or sell them to demons or kick a cop straight in the balls.
But what’s the alternative? If Andrew tries to leave, she’ll track him down, if he doesn’t come crawling back first. If he kills her, it won’t be long before he cracks and follows her. He knows that firsthand.
“What would a good outcome even look like for you?” Ashley asks. “It’s kind of hard to picture you happy.”
It’s probably a good question. Doesn’t mean he has to like it. “Well, I know what a good outcome doesn’t look like, and it’s what I keep getting.”
“So what happens?”
“Mostly we end up dead,” Andrew says. Law enforcement, suicide, each other. That one autoerotic asphyxiation incident; that was fucking embarrassing. “Sometimes our relationship just ends up so fucked that I call it and start over.”
Each other. Is that right? Now that he thinks about it, he’s not sure Ashley’s ever killed him.
“Ooh,” Ashley says. “Speaking of fucking up our relationship.”
He knows what’s coming. He’s heard it often enough.
“Have you screwed me yet?” Ashley asks. There’s always that laughter in her voice, like it’s just a joke, like they don’t both know how fucked up he is. “No consequences, right?”
More times than he can count, and he kept count for a long time. His hands around her throat, her hands around his. Furtive one-offs in alleyways or public bathrooms; nightly fucks in some kind of drawn-out, agonising parody of marriage.
Most of it has been consensual, or close enough. He always tells himself, in the aftermath of the worst incidents, that he won’t stoop that low again. And he doesn’t, for a while.
God, he just keeps making the same fucking mistakes, over and over again. He doesn’t even need to be in a time loop for that.
“Don’t be gross,” he says.
-
He spends a few loops just shooting himself in the head as soon as they get the warden’s gun. Trying to master it, to make it as quick as possible, so he knows he has an easy reset switch to hand.
Doesn’t work. He gets too caught up in Ashley’s reactions. Starts making it deliberately slow instead. Sometimes he’ll just stand with the barrel of the gun against his throat for minutes, letting her cry and plead.
He fucks her against the wall of their neighbour’s apartment one time: one of many. Tries to press the gun into her hands when he’s getting close, breathlessly urges her to shoot him in the head when he comes.
She won’t take it. He has to do fucking everything himself around here.
-
The apartment again. He curls up next to Ashley on her bed, waits for her to wake up.
“Sorry,” he says, when she does.
She raises her eyebrows. “For what?”
“Everything,” he says. “All of it.”
She seems to consider that for a moment.
“Kind of seems like I should get a better apology,” she says. “If it’s for all of it.”
You have no idea. “I just wanted to say it.”
-
“Pretty sure I’m never getting out of this time loop,” Andrew mutters. Lying on the couch in their parents’ house, staring at the ceiling.
They don’t bother their parents much these days. With infinite opportunities to try, Andrew’s mastered the art of talking Ashley out of it; apparently that’s not impossible. They tend to survive longer if they keep their body count low.
Nowadays, they mostly just come here when Andrew really needs to kill someone for stress relief. Mom won’t be home for another hour; he’s already fantasising about how he’ll do it.
“Why the fuck would you try to get out of it?” Ashley asks. “It doesn’t loop back at a specific time, right?”
Andrew shakes his head. “Just when I die.”
“So you get infinite second chances,” Ashley says. “Sounds pretty great to me.”
What’s the point of second chances when you’ll still get it wrong every time?
“So,” Ashley says, “how’d you kick the bucket last time?”
Shut himself in an industrial freezer. Was it? Maybe that was the time before. He tries to switch up the way he dies sometimes, just to keep it interesting.
He sits up on the couch.
“You’ve never killed me,” he says.
Ashley raises her eyebrows. “Huh?”
“I’ve killed you.” A lot, he doesn’t add. “But you’ve never killed me.”
She’s had visions of killing him, she’s said, using the talisman. He knows it’s not beyond her. But it’s never actually happened.
“Whatever,” she says. “You’re taller. You’ve got an unfair advantage when we’re trying to murder each other.”
“God, Ashley, I’m not trying to rub it in.” This weird defensiveness is exactly why he keeps ending up standing over her body. “I’m just – I’m asking, do you want to kill me?”
Ashley folds her arms. “Who wouldn’t want to kill you?”
“This isn’t a hypothetical question,” Andrew says. “It’s an invitation.”
She stares at him for a long moment. He just looks back at her. He’s always looking at her.
“You’re asking me to kill you?” she asks. “Right now?”
Maybe it’ll help to balance things between them, somehow. Alleviate some of Andrew’s guilt for all the times he’s killed her, beaten her, fucked her up in every way he could think of. “I figured you were due a turn.”
A few seconds pass in silence. He wonders how she’ll do it. The gun, probably. Or maybe she’ll use her hands, something more intimate, if she knows he’s not planning to run or fight back.
“What the fuck, no,” Ashley says. “What am I meant to do without you here?”
Andrew shrugs, carefully casual. “I’ll just loop back when I die.”
“Yeah, but what about me?” she asks. “What if I just keep going in this – this universe, or whatever?”
He’s contemplated that question, of course. He was hoping it wouldn’t have crossed her mind.
It must be possible to convince her. She’s always been a short-term thinker.
“This loop is going to end just like all the others,” he says. “We’ll fuck it up, and one way or another I’ll end up dead. Might as well take the opportunity.”
Ashley shakes her head. “Okay, so we just won’t fuck it up.”
“Wow,” Andrew says. “Wish I’d thought of that a billion loops ago.”
-
They actually don’t fuck it up for a while. Ashley’s more cautious than usual, more willing to be talked out of needless risks or murders that don’t achieve anything; she even suggests by herself that they leave without killing their parents. They don’t really need to recharge the talisman, not now that Andrew has seen so much of the future.
Was this the key all along? Inviting her to kill him, making her really face the fact that she doesn’t want him dead? Kind of makes Andrew feel worse about all the times he’s drawn her blood.
They survive longer than usual without things totally collapsing. But that means they survive into unknown territory, end up cornered. Cops hammering on the door of the apartment they’ve holed up in. It was a good run, at least.
“Last chance,” Andrew says, holding his cleaver out to Ashley.
She folds her arms. “I’m still not planning to kill you.”
“You sure?” Andrew asks. “It’s you or them. I know how you feel about other people fucking me. You’re telling me you’re fine with other people killing me?”
Ashley seems to hesitate. “We don’t know they’ll kill us.”
“Right,” Andrew says. “They might just send us to separate prisons. It’s the same thing.”
Ashley says nothing, her eyes on the cleaver.
Andrew knows what hunger looks like on her. She just needs one more nudge.
“I’ll just end up killing myself to send myself back to the start of the loop, anyway,” he says. “I can promise you I’m not living much longer either way.”
She takes the cleaver at last.
“I’m gonna make it slow,” she says, meeting Andrew’s eyes. “And I’m eating you afterwards. Just so you know.”
They’ve fucked so many times by now, in so many different situations, that it’s almost lost its shine. The taboo’s faded, the guilt has dulled. But apparently some things can still go straight to his crotch.
“Good,” he breathes.
If anyone prefers to read on AO3, I should mention that you won't currently find this on my AO3 account, because I've posted it anonymously for now; it's over here.
I've chosen to post this anonymously at first because, uh, I was recently interviewed about fanfiction for a newspaper article. I don't know whether I'll actually end up getting mentioned in the final article, but, if I am, I don't want unsuspecting newspaper readers to wander over to my AO3 account and discover this as the most recent fic on it; it's a little intense!
Particularly sharp-eyed readers may note that I've given the first warden a gun, when only the second warden had one in canon. This is because I can do what I want and you can't stop me.
Title: we're not going to do better next time
Fandom: The Coffin of Andy and Leyley
Rating: 16
Pairing: Andrew/Ashley
Wordcount: 2,700
Summary: Andrew is caught in a time loop. Infinite chances to get this right. It doesn't help.
Warnings: Sibling incest, (temporary) suicide, abuse, allusions to sexual assault, generally kind of fucked up.
Andrew distinctly remembers getting shot extremely fucking dead.
It really doesn’t seem like he should be able to remember that.
He opens his eyes.
This is—
This is their apartment. He’s in his own bed, staring up at the ancient glow-in-the-dark stars Leyley insisted on when they were kids.
Their supposedly burned-down apartment.
That can’t be right.
Did it not burn down? He’s seen the smouldering wreckage on the news; maybe that was a different building?
Did someone reconstruct the building, for some reason? Down to the glow-in-the-dark stars? Unlikely.
And, in either case, there’s a further problem. He does not remember coming back to their apartment block, or to some weird duplicate. What he remembers is getting gunned down by cops in a campsite.
Ashley is in her own bed across the room, sprawled face-down. He’s spent a lot of time watching her sleep; it’s a familiar position that really doesn’t look like it can be comfortable. So she’s here as well, at least. How?
He’s starving, he realises, suddenly. An intense, pervasive ache, a gnawing he’s pretty much learnt to tune out.
But he’s been eating: not enough, maybe, on the run with limited funds, but enough to take the worst of the edge off. He hasn’t felt hunger like this since...
Well. Since they were both trapped in their apartment.
Everything’s exactly the same as it was. The news broadcasts are familiar; the date on them is impossible. The wardens they killed are alive and well. The neighbour they ate is still playing deafening music.
It was a vision, Andrew concludes. Everything since they left the apartment, it was all a weirdly intense premonition of the future. Just like Ashley’s vision of Andrew cutting her throat.
(It’s something he’s been picturing kind of a lot, ever since she mentioned it.)
The fact that they don’t yet have the talisman does kind of throw a wrench in his theory. How could it have given them a vision before Ashley even got it?
But what else could it have been?
One way or another, Andrew is back here, and he knows the future. He can do better this time.
“Hey,” Andrew says. “When the warden comes to check up on us, let’s just not answer. Maybe he’ll unlock the door to see if we’re still in here.”
“Ooh,” Ashley says. “And then what? Kitchen knives?”
“I was thinking more of sneaking out the door while he’s checking the bathroom.” If they can get out of here without any crimes, without the cannibalism, without sacrificing anyone’s souls to possibly-demons, maybe they’ll be able to create some kind of halfway normal life.
It feels like he’s kidding himself. But they might as well try.
In the end, they don’t make it far enough to try at all. Andrew gets spotted while he’s making for the door, takes a bullet to the skull, wakes up back in his bed.
Okay. What the fuck?
Time loops. Okay. Why the fuck not?
For the next few loops, Andrew follows the same steps that got them out of the apartment block the first time. Means they end up leaving some bodies behind, and that Ashley has troubling ties to some kind of maybe-demonic entity, but at least he knows it works.
And then everything gets fucked up, one way or another, and he wakes up back in the apartment.
One loop he tries being a nice guy for once, knocks on their neighbour’s window to warn him, if he goes through with this summoning ritual, he’s going to end up dead. It doesn’t get Andrew any thanks, just a lot of ‘what are you doing on my balcony?’ and ‘oh, noooo, of course I’m not trying to summon horrific entities beyond our understanding.’
And then he and Ashley end up starving to death in their apartment, listening to the meal that could have saved them carrying on with his fucking useless life next door.
He doesn’t bother trying that again.
Andrew prepares himself for his first attempt to tell Ashley about the time loop. Spends the loop’s first hour leaning against the balcony railing, looking down. Trying to memorise every person passing below, every bird that flits past his vision, every one of Ashley’s increasingly pissed-off demands to hang out with her. At the end, he vaults over the railing, wakes up back at the start, heads out to the balcony again.
He does that over and over, until he’s confident he remembers it. Ashley might not believe him at first, but how else is she going to explain the fact that he knows all of that?
She believes him straight away. The whole thing was a waste of fucking time.
One time, he doesn’t kill the warden who discovers Ashley in the closet straight away. Just stands there, watching, waiting to see what happens.
What happens is that his sister gets shot dead. What was he expecting?
He takes his time killing the warden. Staring into Ashley’s dead eyes for every drawn-out second of it. When the warden eventually stops breathing, Andrew’s harder than he’s ever been.
He pulls himself off, his back up against the blood-spattered inner wall of the closet, before he throws himself off the balcony. No sense wasting it.
“Do you know how I feel about you?” Andrew asks, quietly, into the darkness. They’re lying in the same shitty motel bed they’ve shared in twenty other loops, Ashley warm in his arms.
It’s safe to ask, right? Sooner or later, this loop will crash and burn like all the others, and the next loop’s Ashley won’t remember. He’ll never have said it.
Ashley gives an affected gasp. “Why, my dearest brother, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, my fucking God.” He tries to scramble out of her grasp, but she tightens her arms around him. Fuck!
“You’ve just been sooooo subtle.”
Andrew buries his face in her shoulder, his ears burning. “Fuck you.”
Ashley laughs. “Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Well, apparently he knows how this loop is going to end: he’s going to die of fucking embarrassment.
He genuinely tries, most loops. It still goes to shit, every time. If they don’t get out of the apartment, they’ll starve. There’s no way out that doesn’t involve killing the wardens, not that he’s found, and in either case they’d still have the parasite conspiracy breathing down their necks. So they’ll always end up on the run together, and they will always, always fuck things up.
Sometimes he takes a loop off from trying. Fucks things up on purpose, just for a change, just for a little stress relief. He deserves that much, right?
He locks Ashley in the trunk of the car and drives them both off the bridge into the river. The reality of it doesn’t feel as good as the fantasy.
He swerves into oncoming traffic and doesn’t even fucking die straight away. It ends up taking two days of agony, gagged and bound to a hospital bed, because it turns out hospital staff really don’t like it when you beg them to kill you. Ashley died on impact, the bitch, so he doesn’t even have company.
Kind of puts him off any more fucking around with the car.
Maybe the only route to a good outcome is for them to split up. Live their own separate lives.
Ashley won’t let him leave. If he tests her enough, though, maybe he’ll find her breaking point, the thing that’ll make her walk away from him at last. It’d probably be better for both of them.
Maybe that’s just what he tells himself to feel better about the fact that he’s beaten her to shit again.
It’s all going to get reset anyway. Who cares?
“I’m in a time loop,” Andrew says. “I have infinite chances. Why the fuck can’t I get a good goddamn outcome?”
He knows why not. It’s because he’s stuck with this bitch. No matter how hard he works to keep them safe, she’ll fuck it up somehow; she’ll kill the wrong person or sell them to demons or kick a cop straight in the balls.
But what’s the alternative? If Andrew tries to leave, she’ll track him down, if he doesn’t come crawling back first. If he kills her, it won’t be long before he cracks and follows her. He knows that firsthand.
“What would a good outcome even look like for you?” Ashley asks. “It’s kind of hard to picture you happy.”
It’s probably a good question. Doesn’t mean he has to like it. “Well, I know what a good outcome doesn’t look like, and it’s what I keep getting.”
“So what happens?”
“Mostly we end up dead,” Andrew says. Law enforcement, suicide, each other. That one autoerotic asphyxiation incident; that was fucking embarrassing. “Sometimes our relationship just ends up so fucked that I call it and start over.”
Each other. Is that right? Now that he thinks about it, he’s not sure Ashley’s ever killed him.
“Ooh,” Ashley says. “Speaking of fucking up our relationship.”
He knows what’s coming. He’s heard it often enough.
“Have you screwed me yet?” Ashley asks. There’s always that laughter in her voice, like it’s just a joke, like they don’t both know how fucked up he is. “No consequences, right?”
More times than he can count, and he kept count for a long time. His hands around her throat, her hands around his. Furtive one-offs in alleyways or public bathrooms; nightly fucks in some kind of drawn-out, agonising parody of marriage.
Most of it has been consensual, or close enough. He always tells himself, in the aftermath of the worst incidents, that he won’t stoop that low again. And he doesn’t, for a while.
God, he just keeps making the same fucking mistakes, over and over again. He doesn’t even need to be in a time loop for that.
“Don’t be gross,” he says.
He spends a few loops just shooting himself in the head as soon as they get the warden’s gun. Trying to master it, to make it as quick as possible, so he knows he has an easy reset switch to hand.
Doesn’t work. He gets too caught up in Ashley’s reactions. Starts making it deliberately slow instead. Sometimes he’ll just stand with the barrel of the gun against his throat for minutes, letting her cry and plead.
He fucks her against the wall of their neighbour’s apartment one time: one of many. Tries to press the gun into her hands when he’s getting close, breathlessly urges her to shoot him in the head when he comes.
She won’t take it. He has to do fucking everything himself around here.
The apartment again. He curls up next to Ashley on her bed, waits for her to wake up.
“Sorry,” he says, when she does.
She raises her eyebrows. “For what?”
“Everything,” he says. “All of it.”
She seems to consider that for a moment.
“Kind of seems like I should get a better apology,” she says. “If it’s for all of it.”
You have no idea. “I just wanted to say it.”
“Pretty sure I’m never getting out of this time loop,” Andrew mutters. Lying on the couch in their parents’ house, staring at the ceiling.
They don’t bother their parents much these days. With infinite opportunities to try, Andrew’s mastered the art of talking Ashley out of it; apparently that’s not impossible. They tend to survive longer if they keep their body count low.
Nowadays, they mostly just come here when Andrew really needs to kill someone for stress relief. Mom won’t be home for another hour; he’s already fantasising about how he’ll do it.
“Why the fuck would you try to get out of it?” Ashley asks. “It doesn’t loop back at a specific time, right?”
Andrew shakes his head. “Just when I die.”
“So you get infinite second chances,” Ashley says. “Sounds pretty great to me.”
What’s the point of second chances when you’ll still get it wrong every time?
“So,” Ashley says, “how’d you kick the bucket last time?”
Shut himself in an industrial freezer. Was it? Maybe that was the time before. He tries to switch up the way he dies sometimes, just to keep it interesting.
He sits up on the couch.
“You’ve never killed me,” he says.
Ashley raises her eyebrows. “Huh?”
“I’ve killed you.” A lot, he doesn’t add. “But you’ve never killed me.”
She’s had visions of killing him, she’s said, using the talisman. He knows it’s not beyond her. But it’s never actually happened.
“Whatever,” she says. “You’re taller. You’ve got an unfair advantage when we’re trying to murder each other.”
“God, Ashley, I’m not trying to rub it in.” This weird defensiveness is exactly why he keeps ending up standing over her body. “I’m just – I’m asking, do you want to kill me?”
Ashley folds her arms. “Who wouldn’t want to kill you?”
“This isn’t a hypothetical question,” Andrew says. “It’s an invitation.”
She stares at him for a long moment. He just looks back at her. He’s always looking at her.
“You’re asking me to kill you?” she asks. “Right now?”
Maybe it’ll help to balance things between them, somehow. Alleviate some of Andrew’s guilt for all the times he’s killed her, beaten her, fucked her up in every way he could think of. “I figured you were due a turn.”
A few seconds pass in silence. He wonders how she’ll do it. The gun, probably. Or maybe she’ll use her hands, something more intimate, if she knows he’s not planning to run or fight back.
“What the fuck, no,” Ashley says. “What am I meant to do without you here?”
Andrew shrugs, carefully casual. “I’ll just loop back when I die.”
“Yeah, but what about me?” she asks. “What if I just keep going in this – this universe, or whatever?”
He’s contemplated that question, of course. He was hoping it wouldn’t have crossed her mind.
It must be possible to convince her. She’s always been a short-term thinker.
“This loop is going to end just like all the others,” he says. “We’ll fuck it up, and one way or another I’ll end up dead. Might as well take the opportunity.”
Ashley shakes her head. “Okay, so we just won’t fuck it up.”
“Wow,” Andrew says. “Wish I’d thought of that a billion loops ago.”
They actually don’t fuck it up for a while. Ashley’s more cautious than usual, more willing to be talked out of needless risks or murders that don’t achieve anything; she even suggests by herself that they leave without killing their parents. They don’t really need to recharge the talisman, not now that Andrew has seen so much of the future.
Was this the key all along? Inviting her to kill him, making her really face the fact that she doesn’t want him dead? Kind of makes Andrew feel worse about all the times he’s drawn her blood.
They survive longer than usual without things totally collapsing. But that means they survive into unknown territory, end up cornered. Cops hammering on the door of the apartment they’ve holed up in. It was a good run, at least.
“Last chance,” Andrew says, holding his cleaver out to Ashley.
She folds her arms. “I’m still not planning to kill you.”
“You sure?” Andrew asks. “It’s you or them. I know how you feel about other people fucking me. You’re telling me you’re fine with other people killing me?”
Ashley seems to hesitate. “We don’t know they’ll kill us.”
“Right,” Andrew says. “They might just send us to separate prisons. It’s the same thing.”
Ashley says nothing, her eyes on the cleaver.
Andrew knows what hunger looks like on her. She just needs one more nudge.
“I’ll just end up killing myself to send myself back to the start of the loop, anyway,” he says. “I can promise you I’m not living much longer either way.”
She takes the cleaver at last.
“I’m gonna make it slow,” she says, meeting Andrew’s eyes. “And I’m eating you afterwards. Just so you know.”
They’ve fucked so many times by now, in so many different situations, that it’s almost lost its shine. The taboo’s faded, the guilt has dulled. But apparently some things can still go straight to his crotch.
“Good,” he breathes.