Chapter Text
There was something set hard within Ruby’s chest that morning. It felt like resolve and hurt like something cardiac had calcified, but it drove her up and out of her bed.
She called out something vaguely affirmative to Hitch when he knocked and dressed quickly, purposely selecting a new T-Shirt in case Kronos was paying attention to that.
As soon as the meeting ended, Ruby steered Hitch straight to the exit, deciding that Blacker and Froghorn would be okay without their bantering today. Hitch put it a bit of fuss but obliging dropped her off.
Ruby was early enough for school that she might just be able to snag Clancy before he ever reached registration.
Clancy had always been Ruby’s soundboard, a way of testing and peer-reviewing all her ideas. He might not have any idea of what was going on around him, but she knew that he would try as hard as he could when she finally did explain everything to him.
Again.
Idly thinking that she’d officially been to school more than any other eighth grader in the hallways, Ruby threw herself in the seat beside Clancy and immediately leaned in towards him. Clancy leaned back, trying to keep some space in between them.
“Um, hello to you too Ruby.”
“I need to tell you something and you need to take me seriously.”
Clancy visibly steeled himself and watched her expectantly.
“We’re in a time loop,” She listed each point off on her fingers to try and speed the interaction up as much as possible. “You’re in grave danger, I know what happened to G.I. Joe, boys do keep on swinging, and Hogtrotter has the possibility for character development, you’re skipping school with me to brainstorm our way out of this.”
Clancy stared blankly for several seconds, before reaching for his bag under his desk. “With you all the way,” He agreed, and checked over his shoulder. “Just have to be marked in and then we’re good to go.”
Ruby clung to Clancy’s sleeve the whole way home, only letting him cross the road when it was a zebra crossing and no vehicles in sight. Clancy appeared bemused by the opposite of her usual gung-ho, ‘The cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians’ attitude but swivelled his head both ways twice anyway. He even took the initiative and hopped away from drain covers, cracks in the pavement and a child in a pram.
Hitch’s car was missing from the drive and Ruby reset the alarm after herself when they entered. Mrs Digby was out in town, visiting friends and supposedly picking up groceries. Sabina and Brant were booked up all day: Sabina with brunch, lunch and dinner with people she called her ‘colleagues’ but they seemed to find excuses to go out and dine more than actually work, and Brant had golf, a business meeting and a dinner at a different restaurant.
Maybe Hitch would see that someone had entered the house and disabled the alarm when the house was supposed to be empty, but Ruby was sure her actions would have no immediate consequences. Bug greeted them at the door with his tail beating against their legs and streaked past them both to be the first inside Ruby’s room.
Clancy allowed himself to be herded towards the stairs like a particularly confused sheep and finally plopped down on Ruby’s bed among the sheets. Bug had settled on a pile of laundry on the floor, head resting on last-last week’s T-shirt.
Ruby shut her door and leaned against it, eyes searching out the windows to ensure they were closed properly.
Her bedside clock stated 9:30. Registration was only taken in the morning and afternoon. No one would notice them gone until 1pm, and maybe even then Mrs Drisco wouldn’t notice them missing at all.
“Okay,” she started, finally sure she’d checked everything.
Clancy suddenly motioned at her to wait, leaping from the bed and over to where her turntable sat on the floor. She knew what record he was going to reach for before he did: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Clancy had a matching vinyl at home and Ruby was sure it saw plenty of use.
Clancy set it up quickly, dropping the needle with practised ease and turned the music up past a conversational level. “Just in case your room is bugged,” he explained at her baffled look.
Hitch made sure, weekly, that her room was not bugged, but Ruby didn’t say that. He was trying and she needed him to try if they were going to make it through the next thirteen hours.
“Sure,” she said instead, and promptly forgot everything she was about to say afterwards.
“So, there’s a time loop,” Clancy said helpfully, returning to his seat on the bed and grabbing a pillow to hold onto, clearly buckling in for a wild ride. He looked more likely to fall asleep than try to fix this situation, but Ruby let it slide.
“Yeah, we’ve covered that much,” Ruby perched on the edge of the mattress and began unlacing her sneakers. Clancy had already kicked his shoes off at the front door, and Ruby had made him pick them up and carry them to her room in case any adults came home to see Clancy’s beat-up doodled-on sneakers.
“Just tell me everything that happens,” Clancy demanded. “Everything from that first day.”
“It starts with my phones ringing every morning, but no one ever picks up on the other end. Then Hitch comes in to tell me that there’s a meeting at Spectrum. We go to the Diner, or at least we did at the beginning, but they don’t have any raspberry doughnuts, only chocolate.”
Clancy nodded seriously. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ruby reached out to bat at him, but he used the pillow as a shield, bringing it back down on her chest when she pulled her hand back.
“Let me finish. LB holds the meeting, and she says that the Count has been spotted in Downtown, Upper East Side and Main Street. Then Blacker spills his coffee, and I go to school. It’s a normal Monday, and then I try and head home from school.”
“Try?”
“Something happens to you every day and then the loop starts again.”
“Something like…?”
Ruby couldn't look Clancy in the eye, focused on the cuff of his jeans and the way his fingers tangled together like habit. “You die every single day. For the past week.”
Clancy’s elbows gave a traitorous twitch. “Pardon?” he asked. “I misheard you.”
“You didn’t. You’ve died at least seven times in seven different ways.”
Clancy seemed like he was still clinging to the idea that he’d suddenly become deaf. “Every time you die, the world resets and it’s the morning again,” Ruby explained, certain she couldn’t make it any clearer to him. “I need to make sure that you stay safe and try to break the loop.” Ruby fell backwards on the bed, staring at the ceiling instead of Clancy.
“And nothing ever changes?” Clancy asked, gears slowly turning in his head.
Ruby went to shake her head, before something occurred to her, and she nodded abruptly. “I saw the Count that very first day,” She remembered. “He showed me the machine and left, and that’s where you came in and then the machine exploded.”
Clancy wriggled until he was lying down too, still hugging the pillow to his chest. “You haven’t seen the Count since?”
Now that Ruby really thought about it, that was weird. “No, not once. I’ve walked down the road I saw him on, and neither him nor his van is there. It’s the only thing that has been different since that first day.”
“Except me dying.”
Ruby winced. “A little more tact please Clance, it’s not fun to watch.”
“But it is me dying that changes,” he checked, and Ruby nodded, messing her hair up against the mattress below her.
“Okay, well, surely that means the Count is behind this,” Clancy said like it all made sense. “The Count killed me the first time and now he’s gone missing, and I keep dying. So, he’s causing it all.”
“That… checks out I guess,” Ruby said slowly.
Clancy sat bolt-upright again, with a look on his face that suggested he had a plan. “So, we go looking for the Count!” He announced.
“You never agree to go looking for the Count when I suggest it.” Ruby pointed out, not sitting up just yet. It seemed like a spectacularly bad plan for someone who had the current World Record for dying the most times in a row.
“That’s because it’s always dangerous when you do it. But if we find the Count now, he might tell us his plan and then we can try and foil it.” Clancy was standing up now, hopping over telephones and comics to reach her desk. He was well-versed in avoiding the obstacles around Ruby’s room and scooped up his shoes from the doorway.
“I don’t even know where he might be hiding out. The whole of Spectrum was out looking for him and couldn’t find him,” Ruby propped herself up on her elbows to watch Clancy pause, shoulders slumping as his common sense finally caught up with him.
“We’ll keep it on the backburner,” Clancy said finally. “If you don’t want to look for the Count, why don’t we just change everything we can?”
Ruby knew that keeping the loop as similar as possible to that first day clearly wasn’t working but she narrowed her eyes. “What’s the thought process behind that one?”
“I read a book once where the time-loop ended when the guy finally stopped acting like a jerk,”
Ruby squinted even harder at Clancy who winced as he replayed his own words. “You think the time loop is my own moral failing,”
“Well, no, but maybe there’s something that you need to change and if we just put that together then you can finally get to Tuesday.”
“And you could live past fourteen and a half,” Ruby muttered to herself as she finally stood up.
Clancy had grabbed her trashcan and started sweeping bubble-gum wrappers into it. Ruby turned and tweaked her comforter straight over the mattress, pulling a Twinford Junior Leavers hoodie out from under it and a few stray socks.
Ruby stepped over Bug to unplug the three nearest phones to her bed. Bug lifted his head and then turned to look at the closed bedroom door. Ruby didn’t hear the front door open nor close, but Bug stood up and whined at the door. Clancy let him out automatically and distantly the two teens heard Hitch greeting the dog in a baby voice Ruby had never heard him use.
“Don’t worry,” Ruby said softly. “He won’t come up and we can always hide out on the roof.” She unplugged the nearest three phones to her bed, and after a second’s thought, moved the squirrel in a tuxedo to her bookshelves.
“Wait don’t bin that,” She caught sight of Clancy as he grabbed a piece of blue card with a felt-tip message inside. The card folded up into an antelope, with long horns and pointed hooves.
Clancy gave her a confused look. “It’s just me complaining about Madame Loup. The origami isn’t even good.”
“I thought it was good,” Ruby argued. “And I don’t know how to make an antelope yet, I’m trying to reverse-engineer it.”
“It’s a stag,” Clancy said with a hint of hurt in his voice. “And I can always teach you how to make it, bozo.”
Ruby smiled, collecting an armful of dirty laundry and maybe cutting some cleaning corners by throwing some clean laundry down the chute too. “I’d like that.”
Clancy beamed back. “Look, let’s go and grab a snack and then I can show you. We can brain-storm what to do next too.”
Ruby brushed her hands clean and followed him to the door, tucking her desk chair in as she did. Hitch would either be down in his basement suite and unaware of the teenagers, or… or he would be in the kitchen and catch them immediately, but he had Spectrum work to do, searching the streets and she was sure he wouldn’t mind her staying home safe while he was out.
“Sure, I think Mrs Digby made a trifle yesterday, we could probably get a slice or two,” Ruby wrinkled her nose suddenly. “It’s like a week old now though.”
They paused at the top of the stairs, Ruby tilting her head to strain her ears for any movement from the living areas or kitchen. She deemed it safe with a nod and Clancy laughed, somewhat belatedly.
“I’m sure it’s still fresh,” He replied over his shoulder to her, one hand planted on the wall and one on the banister to swing himself down the stairs like a child.
Ruby glanced back into her room to check for anymore dirty clothes and her eyes skipped right over the turntable. The needle had reached the end of the album, and was now spinning in endless circles, with only faint static dripping from the speakers. She’d turn the record to the B-side in a moment when she returned with Clancy to plot.
In the stairwell, Clancy swung his legs to build momentum for his next jump down, and the hand he had braced against the wall slipped.
Ruby was too slow to grab his arm when he fell and cracked his head against the wall, then the steps in quick succession.
Hitch ran into view at the end of the hallway, still too late to catch Clancy as he rolled to the bottom, silent and unmoving.
“Clancy are you—” Ruby called, in a scared voice, trying not to fall herself as she ran down the stairs to his side.
As her foot left the final step, the world shuddered around her, turning on its axis until she was horizontal on her bed.
“Alright?” She finished her question to herself, lost in the din of phones ringing, which should not have been plugged in, and Hitch knocking at her door, unaware of the ninth loop.
She had to try again. Clancy had had a good point yesterday/five minutes ago. Maybe there was a certain way she had to act to reverse the loop.
Hitch swung the door open, and Ruby mustered up a smile at him. The horror of watching Clancy die yet another time was ebbing away, as her heart rate slowed. It was like watching a fictional character die on-screen: they would be back in next week’s episode for an emotional flashback. On the other side of town, Clancy was probably still asleep.
“Good morning,” Her heart wasn’t really in it, but she couldn’t afford to mess another day up by doing the wrong thing.
“Good morning?” Hitch replied, heading for her desk, which was piled high with bubble-gum wrappers and dishes again.
“Sure is,” Ruby sat up and Hitch gave her a quizzical look out of the corner of his eye.
“Are you going to get that?” he asked, pointing at the phone and Ruby reached awkwardly for it without leaving her bed, despite how pointless picking up would be.
“Redfort residence, can I help?” This time she got a few seconds of silence before the line hung up.
She shrugged at Hitch, who was looking increasingly concerned for her well-being. “Why are you here?” She asked, with her best acting voice. “It’s way too early for school.”
“Busy day ahead, you’d better start looking lively,” Hitch quipped, and Ruby obediently swung her legs out of bed, mentally weighing up whether a new T-Shirt would be appropriate. She turned one shirt over with her foot, ‘I Don’t Want to Be Here Either’, and then the next, ‘Can You Help Me? I’ve Lost My Reason for Caring. Last Seen: Beginning of This Conversation’. “LB wants you in, the ever-optimist. She does promise it’s important before you call in sick.”
Finally, she selected a neutral enough one, ‘03042022’ with enough interesting numbers to make it worth it.
“I’ve always wanted to work at Spectrum, why would I call in sick?” Ruby asked, trying her best to be the darling angel daughter her parents had always wanted, before remembering that it was 5:30 and the feral daughter her parents actually had hated being awake before eight on a weekday. “What does she want?”
Hitch fixed her with a long look. “Keep the optimism up kid,” He stated, and then muttered ‘weirdo’ audibly under his breath as he turned away. Ruby imagined there was some fondness in his tone. “It’s about the Count. If you’re quick, I’ll get you a snack on the way.”
“Why are we hanging about if it’s the Count?” Ruby asked grandly, with the practised tone of a Shakespearean character. Hitch smirked as he left the room, dishes balanced carefully in his hands.
“I’ll see you in five,” He told her and let the door click shut.
Ruby turned away from the door to search for a clean pair of flared pants and tried to keep excitement from building up in her chest. She had a plan, had the whole day lying ahead, and Clancy trusting her to keep him safe.
She almost believed she could make it work.
The whole day, Ruby was nearly manic with trying to keep on top of everything around her. she persuaded Hitch to buy LB a coffee at the Diner and walked down the entire Spectrum 8 auditorium to leave it on LB’s podium, still with Marla’s felt-tipped ‘Hitch’ written on the side for the order. She nodded whenever it seemed like LB was looking towards her, and graciously agreed to allow Hitch to drop her at school, but not before warning Blacker to take care with his coffee and swinging past lost property to grab a spare shirt in case he didn’t take care. She complimented Froghorn’s care with his latest case, even if she’d completed it before him, and recommended coconut oil for his hair.
Ruby was late to registration, but she pleaded for Hitch to walk her to the front desk to speak to Mrs Bexenheath about letting her tardy mark slip this one time. She had figured that the benefits of making Mrs Bexenheath’s day better outweighed the negatives of missing registration, and she even sought Mrs Drisco out in the corridors during recess to apologise for her lateness and offer to carry a pile of marking up to the staffroom to make it up to her.
She answered every question in English, and in Maths, and was told to stop putting her hand up in Science. Every pop-quiz, every practice essay and every textbook test was completed perfectly.
She asked about Mouse’s latest read, about Del’s softball game, about Elliot’s high scores at the arcade (and promised to beat them all), about Red’s latest mishap and offered to lend her own guitar again, no matter how painful it was.
Ruby was exhausted by the end of the school day, but whenever she felt like relaxing, her anxiety, the fear of Clancy’s pale lax face, would take over. She couldn’t stop at this point. It was 3:24, so close to the end of the day that she almost couldn’t cope with the nervous excitement souring the back of her throat.
She gotten Elliot, who’d gotten Red, who’d gotten Del to pass a message to Clancy to meet her afterschool, at the front gate where Mr Walford patrolled and where there would be a crowd of people to watch any danger.
She would drag Clancy to the library, where she’d explain his French homework to him, and cross her fingers until four o’clock came. And then she’d ring Hitch to give them a lift and beg for information about the Count and explain everything that had happened to them where they could understand and remember what she’d said.
The bell rang and Ruby was out of her seat quickly, thanking a bemused Mrs Schneiderman, and then walked (running was not allowed in the school halls, and neither was rollerblading thanks to Del) to the front gate, pressing herself to the wall to stay out of the way of throngs of chattering and whooping teenagers.
She was too busy checking her watch to notice Clancy come up on her left, waving his hand in her line of view without being purposely startling. Her face broke into a grin upon seeing him, stupid patterned shirt and all, and he returned it, simply just pleased to see her.
3:42
“Will you come to the library with me?” She asked, crossing her fingers on her right hand. “I know your dad has that thing, but I’ll get Hitch to give you a lift back at four, and he can talk to your dad and the Duchess too probably.”
Clancy looked like he was about to decline, but then he looked at her properly, at the way she was clenching her jaw anxiously as she waited for him to reply.
“Yeah,” He said finally, with another grin. Ruby wouldn’t have asked him if it wasn’t important to her, and with any luck, his dad would be too busy with the Duchess to realise he was missing a kid. “Yeah, sure, I could do with your help on my French.”
Ruby led him down the halls, fear making her steps quick and hurried. Really, there was nothing different about Clancy being in the halls or the library when four pm approached, but if she made it to the library it felt like her plan was working. Like everything was worth it.
Clancy wasn’t as keen on rushing to the library, loping along easily behind her. “I didn’t see you in registration this morning.”
“I was late, Hitch had to make a stop before school,” She told her, turning her head to give him a slow blink, signalling that Hitch was not just completing butler-y duties. Clancy’s face brightened at the mention of Spectrum, no matter how vague it was. “I’ll tell you over your French tenses, promise.”
She was just moving her head to look at the approaching library door, hand outstretched to open it, when Clancy tripped over his own feet behind her. Immediately she had spun around, steadying him with her hands on his upper arms and gaze fixed intently on his face. She’d been braced for this all day, and a part of her was already crumbling with relief at the fact she had caught him before his fall.
“You’re okay,” She promised. She was only repeating everything that had passed through her head the last nine days, watching Clancy fall, and fall, and fall. “You’re okay Clancy, just keep breathing for me. I’m going to fix it, I’ll fix everything, you just need to breath, okay?”
Her watch had said 3:55 the last time she looked at it, and then she had firmly pulled her sleeve down to stop tempting fate. That had been a few hallways back, surely, they had made it?
Clancy was looking at her with wide eyes and shuffled his feet underneath himself to stand properly. “It’s good,” he mumbled, and Ruby wondered how much of an over-reaction her response had seemed to be.
She let him stand by himself, let him regain a normal distance from her but her arms still reached out for him in case the worst happened. “I’m fine,” He added, like it was him who had to comfort her, and Ruby took a slow deep breath. She would take a bewildered, weirded-out Clancy over a dead one. “You know I have two left feet, the floor just tried to keep my reflexes strong.”
In that moment, with Clancy stood just a few feet from her, his shirt dwarfed him, his skinny arms swimming in the flowery pattern.
He reached a hand up and wiped a knuckle over his nose. It came back smudged with red.
Clancy looked at Ruby with confusion in his eyes and blood smeared across his cheek before he began to list slowly to the side.
Ruby tried to step forward, but her legs were slow, and the knowledge of her failure again and again lay heavy in her stomach. Clancy crumpled to the ground and Ruby squeezed her eyes closed, more than familiar with the hot tears running down her cheeks. She faltered backwards with tripping feet, her back hitting the wall first and leaning all of her body weight against it.
“Please,” She murmured, wishing she were back in bed. One more time, one more chance. She could do this and get Clancy out safe and sound on the other side. She just had to… recalibrate, change the plan when she woke up. That was all.
She wondered when she had stopped seeing Clancy’s death as an all-consuming horror and simply a… fact.
Clancy was still, head turned away from her. Ruby swallowed convulsively, trying hard to keep a hold on her stomach. The view of Clancy’s body blurred as tears finally fell down her cheeks. She slid down the wall slowly, half-expecting it to fall out from behind her. Her sneaker came close to Clancy’s hand, palm turned upwards and bloody. His nail polish was chipped, and Ruby fought a hysterical laugh at the realisation that she had noticed that of all things.
“Clancy?” Her voice cracked harshly on the second syllable.
It was dead quiet all around in the school hallways and Ruby’s arm felt so heavy she couldn’t even call Hitch. He hadn’t even arrived in time for the last… ten.
“Still?” she asked the silent room. Clancy didn’t move.
“I tried so hard,” She couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper, but no one was listening anyway. “I really tried. Why didn’t it work?”
Ruby closed her eyes, tacky and heavy with tears and rested her head against the wall.
Unseen, her watch ticked the final ten seconds away to four o’clock.
Ruby woke up. And wished she hadn’t.