Fandom: John Dies at the End

Ship: John/Dave/Amy

Category: F/F/M

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 5,606

Genre: Time Loop

Mid-afternoon on the fifth iteration of Friday, April 20th, John bursts through Amy's front door and says, "I've got it!"

Amy keeps her eyes on her TV. Shinji's about to get in the robot for the first time; she always enjoys this part. "Hmm?" she says.

"It's aliens."

"Hmm."

"Think about it." John climbs over the back of the futon and drops down beside her. Amy politely pauses the elderly neighbours' Netflix. "What's a big part of every good alien invasion story?"

"The omnipresent threat of a military dictatorship?"

"Anal probing."

Huh. Amy frowns a little, thinking this over. She can't say this idea has occurred to her. "How does that apply to our situation?"

"Well, when they kidnap us, they need us to feel like things are okay, right? Hard to probe a human who's fighting back." He pushes his fake glasses up onto his head as he speaks, the goofy tortoiseshell ones that he wears when he wants to look like a 'super genius professor' (his words). It's kind of sweet. "So maybe, they beamed us up and then used their technology to reconstruct our world so we'd think everything was okay. But we're actually in the Matrix, and out there, they're doing experiments to learn our biology and our weaknesses and shit, so they can come back to conquer the rest of humanity."

It's the plot to Slaughterhouse-Five, kind of, if you squint. Amy's pretty sure that John doesn't know that. She takes a moment to turn this theory over in her head. "Then why would they throw in a time loop? That's just going to tip us off that something's wrong."

For a moment John just looks at her, a little frown between his eyebrows. Eventually he nods and claps her on the shoulder.

"Good point, man," he says, and gets up to leave.

Amy likes to make lists. If you have a list, then you have something you can manage. Even if it's incomplete, even if it won't be there tomorrow because tomorrow will be another today, a list is a good starting point for any plan.

She's already explained this to John, so when she pulls out her ugly kitten-themed notebook and writes Loop #9 at the top of a fresh page, he doesn't make her explain her list logic again. Instead he asks, "Why are you still keeping count?"

"Why aren't you?" she returns. Even to her own ears it sounds snippy, but John doesn't seem to register it. He just shrugs.

"Don't know. It didn't seem like it really mattered, after the first few times."

"That makes sense, I guess," Amy admits. "I don't know either, I just want to. Okay, let's start with the obvious ones."

Below her page heading she makes a bullet point: Groundhog Day.

"Man, I wish," John says. "It seems way too easy, though."

"Fixing the problem by becoming better people?" He nods, and she can't help but agree. "Yeah. It never works that way."

"You're telling me."

A brief silence falls. John scrunches up his nose in thought. When Amy first met him she thought it was some dumb affectation he did, but now she knows that it's just how his face works, just him. A lot of John is like that, she's finding. Amy starts to idly doodle a couple of tetrahedrons around the edges of her page.

Eventually John says, "Although, I guess you could argue that that isn't how old Bill did it."

"How did he do it, then?"

"He got the girl." Another contemplative silence. "Do you think we need to get married?"

"You and me, or you and Andie MacDowell?"

"Uh, either. Both?"

"No to both." One by one her tetrahedrons gain a few features, becoming little pyramidal monsters. "Andie MacDowell is probably married. I don't think we could make a divorce happen and convince her to marry you in one day. And I still haven't even married David yet."

"Oh." John visibly deflates. "Too bad, I bet Andie's still hot."

In concession to this, Amy adds a subpoint: marry AM? "What's the next most obvious one?"

"Uh. Buffy, season 6."

Oh, right: Amy had forgotten about that episode. She's glad John agreed to brainstorm this together. "That was a good one," she says, adding it to her list. Buffy had gotten out by performing well at a crappy job, so she notes that down too. "Next would be… Star Trek?"

John shrugs again. "Haven't seen it, but sure."

"None of it?" Amy asks, startled into looking up from her notebook. "Oh. Most of the series are on Netflix. We should watch one sometime."

John looks a little surprised and pleased about this, for some reason. Maybe he's a bigger fan of science fiction than she'd realized. "Cool. What's the solution there?"

"Spoilers," Amy says solemnly, but she still jots down, android brain messages (tricky).

In the end they have the following:

• Groundhog Day
  • marry AM?
• Buffy
  • customer service
• ST:TNG
  • android brain messages (tricky)
• Majora's Mask
  • beat final boss
• Edge of Tomorrow
  • beat final boss
• X-Files
  • stop bomber (brain messages)
• The Dark Tower
• Madoka Magica
  • become god???

It's limited to stories one or both of them is familiar with, because—well, because Amy had looked up 'time loops in fiction' on their third April 20th and been completely overwhelmed. Imposing limits had seemed important, but now that they have their list, it does feel a little flimsy.

"It's better than nothing," she offers, looking up at John. He gives her a thumbs up that somehow feels completely sincere.

Amy tries being good at her job. A month or so back—a month before the loop started, that is—she'd been hired at a call centre for an insurance company. It's an awful job and she isn't sure how long she can stick it out, but for the sake of ending this temporal glitch, she gives it a try. Even though Friday really should be her day off.

A difficult customer calls in, an older woman who has clearly never worked customer service a day in her life, and Amy takes her yelling like a saint. She's polite, patient, and courteous, and she actively goes out of her way to help. She doesn't focus too hard on her quota; typically she has 360 seconds to resolve a call, and she watches those seconds tick away while she tries to calm the woman down. When the woman demands to speak to a manager, Amy is gracious and kind and puts her through to the supervisor on shift, Creepy Tom.

All it gets her is a reprimand for being too lenient and a strong hint that she should be doing some unpaid overtime to make up the calls. So she strikes that one off their list.

They don't tell David every time. Amy does feel a little bad about it, but as John pointed out once, early on: it's not like it makes much difference to David. Either the loop doesn't end and their decision to tell him or not tell him becomes meaningless, or it does end and from David's perspective he's only one day behind on information. Besides, it's not like David has never kept her in the dark regarding some huge cosmic nightmares that could have ended the world as she knew it.

Still, two wrongs don't actually make a right.

"I'm going to call him," she says on their 18th loop, when John walks into her kitchen. She's pretzeled up on one of the hard, uncomfortable wooden chairs, drinking her morning Cherry Coke.

John says, "Okay," and hops up onto the counter next to her.

Amy sets the phone on speaker and puts it on the table. It rings three times before David picks up.

"Hey," David says, sounding a little wary.

"Hi," she says, adding, "John's here, you're on speakerphone," to head off the uncomfortable apologizing he'll try to do if he thinks it's just them.

It works, as always. "Oh. Okay."

"Hey buddy," says John.

"So what's this, then, an intervention? Because I really thought that John would be—"

"There's a thing happening," Amy interrupts. "A John-and-David thing." That's not strictly correct, of course—it is, pretty clearly, a John-and-Amy thing this time, or at the very least a John-and-David-and-Amy thing—but saying as much always drags this conversation out a lot longer than it needs to be. It's good to optimize.

"Wait, really? What kind? Please tell me it's not another fucking unicorn dick."

"Nah," John says, "this one doesn't have a name yet. Or technically it does, it's just, you named it and then forgot because we've got a whole time loop thing happening, so obviously you can give it whatever great name you want, but you're gonna forget by the time the loop resets and then I'll have to explain it to you."

For a moment all that comes across the line is the faint sound of traffic out near wherever David is: honking, screeching tires, the rumble of a bike with no muffler. In her head, Amy counts, Four, three, two, one—

"What the fuck," David says. "You're fucking with me. You are fucking with me, right?"

"Cellar door," Amy says quietly, shutting her eyes when David promptly falls silent again. It's their code phrase. She hates using it, or she did, but now she's used it so many times she's becoming inured to the words.

David, of course, is still startled by it. "I'm coming home right now," he says in a serious tone that makes something ache inside her, in that raw, jagged spot she's filled with only her love for him. It always does; that, at least, hasn't lost any meaning.

You don't need to, she'd told him the first couple of times they had this conversation. Now she says, "Yes, please. Um, don't run any red lights or anything. But we'll be here."

He's holding two cups of burnt corner store coffee when he arrives, one for himself and one for John. She must have caught him while he was in line. "How many times?" he asks without preamble.

"This is number 18," she says. "Nobody's on the sauce, by the way. And there's no shadow people around, as far as either of us can tell."

David grimaces, joining Amy at the table. "I figured the whole 'I know exactly what you're going to say' thing would come up, but it's actually super fucking weird now that it's happening. It's almost as bad as the time John could read my mind for a couple of days."

John, still seated on the countertop, stretches one long leg out to kick David in the arm. "Ask the lady what we've tried so far," he says, "she's got lists."

"I'll fucking bet she does," David says, and Amy glances over her shoulder in time to catch John's grin.

Together they go through the things-we've-tried list. Amy hasn't actually bothered to write it down for a good few loops now, so going through the list mostly consists of Amy listing things out loud while she focuses on not forgetting anything, with John providing background commentary. It's frustrating to do this, list all of their failures in a row, even though she always wants David's insight. Calling Marconi hadn't gotten them anywhere, and neither, so far, has anything they've tried from fiction; the fact that nobody is dying during their loops ultimately eliminated lots of options before they even started.

Towards the end of the brainstorming session, when David's run out of ideas to float, Amy stands up to put her Coke can in the recycling and winces when a sharp, deep pain flares in her spine.

David looks up immediately, frowning. "Want me to grab your pills?"

"No. Um, I ran out," Amy admits. "The pharmacy says I can't have them until Monday."

"Jesus, Amy." He stares at her in a sort of horror, which is exactly why she's avoided mentioning it in any previous loop. "You're stuck in this without your pain pills?"

"It's fine. I took them after dinner the night before this all started, so they really only wear off by mid-afternoon. It's like I have them but they have a shorter half-life than usual, it's fine."

Of course, saying it's fine twice in a handful of sentences only ever serves to indicate that something isn't fine. Before David can point this out, though, John says, "I've got weed at my place. You want to try it? Just restocked yesterday."

Amy... doesn't hate the idea, honestly. She's only ever smoked a couple of times before, but it helped, she's pretty sure. "I don't hate that idea," she says. But she adds, "Not now, though. I really just want to lie down."

So she does. A few minutes later, after she's curled herself up into a cozy ball made of mostly blanket and couch cushion, David joins her. He drops a kiss on top of her head idly when he sits down.

Nothing else really gets done during loop 18 but, even knowing how much he'll miss if the loop doesn't break, David doesn't seem to resent that. It's funny: their first time through this day, Amy had been so certain that things would be tense, once David got home. That everything would be strained and uncomfortable. She'd stressed herself out so badly thinking about it that there was a moment, when she woke up and found that it was still April 20th, where she truly thought the force of her anxiety had broken time itself.

If nothing else, at least she'd been wrong about that.

Sometimes they spend a loop or two just not doing anything. Amy hangs out at home, John does whatever it is John does when he's not with her or David. They try—or at least, Amy tries—not to do it often, because Amy's seen firsthand what inertia can do to someone in a bad situation, and she's going to resist that as long as she can. But she also knows acutely how important it is to take breaks.

She's working through the pile of video games she's acquired but never played, largely bargain-bin dungeon crawlers with the occasional RPG or shooter that came to her as a gift. There's something fun, in a meta sort of way, in trying to marathon an entire game in a single 24-hour period. Her brother Jim never had the patience for these kinds of games, always boiling over in rage when he had to grind for too long or strategize too hard, but Amy's always found it kind of soothing. Even if she messes up, the game will always reset. Nothing is permanently lost.

"I read a book once," John says, then falls silent. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel of his truck and gazes out at the cows roaming lazily behind wire fences, heedless of the gravel John's tires are kicking up.

(Cows help John think, apparently, so sometimes they drive out to the farmland on the outskirts of Undisclosed. It's not like they have anything better to do, and besides, he's right: they do have kind eyes.)

Amy lets the pause stretch out, longer and longer, watching the herds herself. Finally, she gives up. "You read a book once?"

"Okay, I actually don't remember now if it was a book I read or a dream I had, or something I hallucinated on a bad trip, but it was about wizards so I guess all options are equally trustworthy." This logic cannot be faulted. "There was, like, secret magic. Magic that comes from secrets. You tell someone something you've never told anyone else, and it lets you harness some kind of power to, uh, do something. I don't know, that part's hazy. But it might be worth a shot?"

Amy wrinkles up her nose. "That sounds like the kind of thing a creepy teenage boy would say to get in a girl's pants."

"True. Want to try it anyway?"

She shrugs. "Let's add it to the list."

Their list is kind of tiny at the moment and Amy is fresh out of better ideas, so they wind up trying it that evening. After about ten minutes of uncomfortable, focused silence, John admits, "Okay, this is tougher than I expected."

They're sitting on the roof of John's house, because when Amy was a little kid, she used to climb out her bedroom window and sit on the roof of her childhood home; it helped her think. April 20th has turned out to be unseasonally warm after nightfall anyway, so it's nice.

Plus, she doesn't trust the shingles holding the roof of her own home together as far as she can throw them. With her missing hand.

"Agreed," she says. "There's plenty of small things, but I can't think of anything important that I've never told anyone."

"Exactly. I've known Dave too long, he knows all my shit." John drops back to lie on the roof, folding his hands behind his head and squinting one eye shut, thoughtful. "I guess until before all this I might've had something, but."

But, indeed. Amy sighs and hugs her knees to her chest. "Maybe we should go with things we just haven't told each other, then?"

"Amy Sullivan." John's grin is swift and gleeful. "Now who's trying to get in whose pants?"

"You're not funny," Amy tells him seriously, but John just shrugs like he's pretty sure he is. "You said it yourself anyway, there's got to be a reason that you and I, specifically, are stuck together."

"Assuming there is a point to any of this, and it's not just a cosmic joke by some jacked-up alien species whose sole source of information on Earth is old Punk'd reruns?"

It's a direct quote of something David has said on a few loops, and he puts on his David voice to do it: dry, a little bitter, the words coming out twice as fast as either John or Amy would have said them. It's pretty dead-on, and Amy's amusement must show, because John gives her this soft little smile.

Amy has come to recognize that smile over the subjective weeks they've spent trying to fix this. It's his thinking-about-David face. Privately, she's come to like it: she can relate.

"Yes. Okay. What do you have for me?"

He doesn't take more than a second or so to think. "Remember when Molly saved your life?"

Wow, okay, Amy thinks, startled by the abrupt shift. He must have been mulling this over for a while. "Do I remember when my dog died by jumping in front of a bullet for me? Of course."

"Yeah, I stopped time before she did that. You—wait, you knew that's what the sauce did that time, right?" He raises his head and looks over just long enough to register her raised eyebrows, then settles back into position. "Okay. Sorry, that whole situation is kind of, uh, hazy these days. So, I stopped time before Molly appeared, when Dave was gonna try to sacrifice himself instead. I tried to convince him not to."

"Oh." Amy isn't sure what else to say. She hugs her knees tighter to her chest, purses her lips. "Are you about to apologize to me?"

"No. I mean, okay, obviously there was no chance he'd ever do it. But I still wanted him to pick his own life." He leaves over yours unspoken.

Amy says, "Good."

She means to say more—to try to come up with the words—but John looks at her again, meets her eyes, and she thinks that maybe she doesn't need to. It's a nice realization to have, a nice feeling.

"Your turn," John says.

Amy thinks on this. When it's not bracketed by mortal peril, emotional honesty tends to give her hives, but she wants to tell John something of equal weight. Or at the very least, something that isn't I think the lyrics to Camel Holocaust are kind of clever.

She's still not sure she's got it, but: "I used to resent you a lot. It felt like, it didn't matter what I did, because you would always have been there way before me."

John startles her by laughing out loud. "Really? I mean, sure, but I'm a total fucking dildo."

Another of David's phrases. "Good point," Amy says drily, and John cracks up again. He flails a hand out to pat her, rather companionably, on the shin.

The next morning is still April 20th. Amy's not totally surprised, but she wishes she were.

They hit loop 32 before John finally remembers to look up Andie MacDowell and confirm if she's still hot.

She is, he reports, and she turns out not to be married, but the vote against that plan still shakes out to two against a very disappointed one.

"Fine! You two should really try getting hitched, though."

"John," David says warningly, but he stops short when Amy fishes an ice cube out of her glass of Sprite and throws it at John. It bounces satisfyingly off his forehead, leaving an undoubtedly sticky trail behind it. "Holy shit. How did you land that shot from there?"

He sounds impressed, and it's a fair question. Amy's lying on her living room floor with her feet up on the couch; John is a solid 15 feet across the room, and her view of him is pretty upside-down. Amy shrugs against the carpet. "Practice."

There's a pause long enough that Amy wonders if David's about to get weird about her and John spending all this time together. He hasn't yet, but it's not like the loops can't still surprise her. Instead he ultimately says, in a quiet, confused voice, "That's weirdly hot."

Finally, after 44 total days spent spinning her wheels, Amy has something that feels a little bit like a breakthrough. It irritates her immensely because it's not her brain that gets her there, not her research capabilities or her gift for detective work. It's her libido.

David would be so proud of her. She is so annoyed with herself.

Here are the facts, as Loop 44 Amy sees them:

She hasn't had an orgasm in a subjective month and a half. Sure, there are times when her pain meds would make this a non-issue for her, but it's not consistent; it fluctuates with the weather and her hormones and whatever other invisible forces think they get to dictate what her body does. And she isn't even properly on her pain meds, not on April 20th. Amy's frustrated, sexually speaking.

One solution to this problem would be to sleep with her fiancé. This is, luckily for Amy, not something that is typically hard to arrange. But she has morals, unfortunately, and she loves David, and she's not about to sleep with him knowing full well that it will all be erased, that he won't remember it in the morning. The pragmatic David-voice in her head says she's being silly, but of course, the pragmatic David-voice sounds identical to the David-voice that loves to encourage her poorer decisions. It just seems, well, gross. She won't do it.

Naturally the answer would seem to be that she should take matters into her own hand. This is where the crux of the problem lies, because Amy, it turns out, also can't do this. She grew up religious and she wears guilt like most people wear pants. Not so much the general sexual guilt—not anymore—but the more old-fashioned kind, the interpersonal guilt that simmers under the surface of her awareness until she edges too close to the source. That guilt appears every time she tries to get in the mood, when her mind inevitably wanders to the last time she had sex.

Amy lies on her rumpled bed sheets as the sun starts to peek through her broken Venetian blinds, diagonal across the bed in the same position that she's woken up in for the past 44 days of her life. The now-familiar sound of John whistling while he makes coffee slinks in under the closed bedroom door, and Amy buries her face in David's pillow to keep from making any frustrated noises out loud. While she's there, she thinks about John, how he's always up before her on April 20th. Always in her kitchen or her living room when she jerks awake at 10:09 am, or else already gone entirely.

This is ridiculous. Amy makes a snap decision and fishes her phone out from under the comforter. She lifts her head long enough to text a message to David: Call John.

His reply comes less than a minute later: Why

Just do it please.

She drops her phone and rolls over. In a moment she hears a tinny ring from her kitchen.

"Hey buddy," says John's muffled voice. "Huh? Yeah, still here. What's…"

His voice fades out of range as he moves further from her door. Amy frowns at the stucco ceiling in consternation. "Fine," she tells the invisible spectre of the time loop. "You win."

It takes David about 35 minutes to get home on most loops, depending on the time of day and traffic and how serious Amy sounds when they call to tell him what's happening. Which means Amy has about 35 minutes to think about what to say and make faces at the wall and remind herself that being cursed to live the same day endlessly isn't completely unlike mortal peril, so actually, talking about her feelings is the correct response here.

She still doesn't know what to say when David walks in the door and tosses her a plastic-wrapped muffin. Luckily, John solves the problem for her. "Come in here, dude, we gotta talk about that time we all boned."

David stops short. He opens his mouth and says, "That time—" before cutting himself short. "Fuck, I guess that wasn't literally twelve hours ago for you guys, was it?"

The words come out bitter, his tone a little dark and edged with self-loathing. It's exactly what Amy had been worried about, way back on that first April 20th. But they can push past it, she thinks, surprising herself in doing so.

"No. More like…" Amy does some quick math in her head. "About one thousand and sixty-eight hours."

This earns her an exasperated look, one she's learned over the years actually masks a deep well of affection for her. Maybe this won't suck as much as she feared. "Show-off."

"Get a room," John says lightly, like a reflex. "Dave, man, sit down, nothing's gonna pop up and tentacle-hug your face. Probably. No, yeah, we'd have seen it by now, you're good."

"Probably," Amy adds, just to be mean.

David rolls his eyes but doesn't otherwise protest, dropping into the crummy old recliner he likes. He doesn't look grudging, or mad, or anything else Amy would have expected. A little wary, maybe, but mostly he just looks... expectant.

And just like that, a thought occurs to Amy: has he been waiting, this whole time, for them to bring this up? Every time they've told him, every time they've brought him into the loop metaphorically if not temporally, has he been expecting this conversation to happen?

Amy thinks about that night, about the way he'd watched—his eyes huge and serious—when she'd made John sit on their bed so she could kiss him without straining her neck. The way he had kissed John, all teeth and hands, like he thought if he didn't hold on tight enough the whole thing might slip away. When Amy was in his lap, after, John had slid his hand up under David's t-shirt, and Amy had felt him trembling. She'd been close enough, she'd noticed.

That spot inside of Amy, the space where David lives, aches.

"Oh, we're stupid," she says, groaning into her hand.

David stares at her. "What did I do?"

"Not you." Amy looks up, gestures between herself and John. "Us. This whole time we've been tiptoeing around it."

That actually seems to clue John in. He blinks at her, then at David. "Oh. Wait. Dave, you have feelings."

David's frown, which has been deepening so much it looks like his eyebrows are about to meet, turns outright stormy. "I'm leaving," he says, and stands.

"No, you're not." Amy waves him back down, thinking too quickly to remember her manners. She's so annoyed with herself. Maybe her anxiety really did break time. "You. John. Tell him."

David glances back and forth between them: Amy on the couch, John lounging on the floor. "What?"

But John doesn't miss a beat. All these weeks together really have helped Amy figure out how to talk to him; he must have been learning the same from her. "Bud," John says quietly, nudging his leg against David's ankle. "I'm not going anywhere."

The silence that follows feels long, but it's probably not more than a few seconds. David says fervently, "I hate this."

"Didn't I tell you?" John continues, heedless. He's good at that, at not heeding. "Come on, man, I told you, there's no version of this world where you're not stuck with me."

He says it so casually, this huge, romantic thing, that for a horrifying moment Amy thinks she might be about to cry. Thankfully David ruins it, hissing, "I will murder you."

"I'm not going anywhere either," she says, and he turns his glare on her.

"What the fuck," he says. His eyes are wide and overwhelmed, and she wants very much to kiss him. "I don't understand you people."

Amy hears what he's trying to say. She shrugs. "You don't need to," she says, "that's the point."

John sits up a little and smiles at her, and Amy thinks, This will work. She's sure of this, so sure it makes her feel even dumber for circling around it for so long. Even if this doesn't break the loop, they'll have this conversation again when they get out. It will work.

"I think that's a wrap," he says. "What's for lunch?"

It's mercy, an out: an excuse for David to leave the room so he can fume, and think, and come to the conclusion he needs to come to. David rolls his eyes, flips John off, and goes to look in the pantry.

Loop 44 is pretty uneventful beyond that point, though Amy thinks that both John and David would agree that their ten minutes of talking was plenty eventful. There's no sign, though, that the loop has broken, if it has; there's no choir of angels or shimmering light or double rainbows on the horizon. So she's a little caught off guard in the evening, after David tells John to put his height to good use and pull down the Scrabble board.

Their board games are stuffed in a closet, piled precariously atop each other. (Amy has a bit of a yard sale problem, sue her.) The Scrabble board is way back on the top shelf where David threw it about six months back, after a blackout where they'd played by candlelight and Amy had beat him nine times in a row.

Even for John, it's a stretch. "I'm not seeing it," he says into the closet, standing on his toes. "Are you—oh it's—hey, what's that?"

A scraping sound; a muffled curse; glass shattering. Amy looks over, alarmed, to find John staring at the floor.

"The fuck?" he says, which summons David's attention, too.

"Jesus, John, you had one job. What did you break?"

"I, uh, I think it was an hourglass? Dave, why did you have a big, glowing hourglass in your closet?"

Amy's insides go cold. David says, "What? I didn't. What?"

"What?" echoes Amy. She puts down her book and joins them, peering at the pile of glass and—yes, that's sand, on the floor. The sand is an ominous blood red. Amy has never seen this hourglass before in her life.

"How do these things keep appearing," David mutters, but Amy ignores him.

She stares.

She says, "Oh, that's so—"

Amy wakes up. Her back hurts. This is, she realizes a few confused moments later, because she's lying on the floor in front of her games closet.

On either side of her, John and David are also returning to consciousness. She sits up and looks: the remains of the hourglass are gone.

John finds his way to lucidity first, blinking stupidly at the far end of the hall—or rather, at the open window there. "It's morning," he says.

There's a soft light coming in through the window. Outside it, the blackbirds are singing. He's right.

Amy reaches into the pocket of David's hoodie and retrieves his phone, ignoring his half-conscious protests. She clicks the screen on and squints, trying to make out the date through the cracks in the screen.

There it is. "April 21st," she says, shoving the phone at John. He looks down at it and smiles, wide and genuine. When Amy laughs, it sounds a little hysterical to her own ears. "This is, without a doubt, the dumbest thing that's ever happened to me."

"Really?" John hops to his feet, then reaches down to help Amy to hers.

Amy's back protests but she barely notices it, really: she has no idea what's going to happen today, and she's never been so happy to be uncertain.

John moves on to David. He grabs David's arm despite his grumbling. "Honestly," he continues, "I don't think it's even in my top ten."