(Thank you @ryhsrunner for the prompt- tbh it prob wasn’t a prompt but I’m using it as a prompt bc I love a good angsty moment)
Mark had died forty-three times before he stopped counting.
Not always in dramatic ways. Sometimes it was a villain, something he hadn't seen coming fast enough, the kind of hit that would have been survivable on a better day. Sometimes it was his own fault in ways he couldn't stop replaying even after the reset made them technically un-happen. Twice it was nothing heroic at all — just wrong place, wrong timing, the universe making a point about how even Invincible could be caught off guard by ordinary disaster.
He'd hated it at first. The disorientation, the grief of watching people un-know things he'd told them, the specific misery of losing progress on things that mattered to him.
He'd gotten used to it the way you get used to anything given enough repetitions.
That was, he would later understand, its own kind of damage.
Iteration seven, maybe eight — early enough that he was still trying to be systematic about it, still treating the loop like a problem to be solved through sufficient heroic effort — he'd taken a different route back from a patrol that had gone sideways and landed on a roof to reorient, and you'd been there.
Just sitting on the ledge with your feet dangling, not in distress, not doing anything except existing in the particular way of someone who'd come somewhere to be alone and had their own kind of peace about it.
"You okay?" he'd asked, on instinct.
"I'm not going to jump," you'd retorted immediately. "I just like the height."
He'd almost left. He had things to do, leads to follow, the ongoing project of trying to figure out what was causing the loop and how to break it.
Instead he'd said "yeah, I get that" and looked out at the city for a minute, and somehow the minute had become twenty, and he'd left knowing your name and approximately nothing else and thought about the conversation for the rest of that iteration without being able to explain why.
He went back to the roof.
There was a version of himself he was becoming — had become, iteration by iteration, in the long stretch of the loop — that he wasn't sure he liked.
Not cruel. Not broken, exactly. Just— loose. Unmoored from consequence in ways that started small and compounded. He'd said things to people that he'd never have said in a first-time timeline, because what did it matter, they wouldn't remember, the reset would take it back. He'd picked fights he had no business picking just to see what happened. He'd made choices in the field that were reckless because he would survive even if the outcome was bad and the outcome wouldn't stick anyway.
He'd gotten, in the middle iterations, in the long gray stretch, very good at not caring about things.
You were the exception he didn't have a good explanation for.
Every iteration, at some point, he ended up on that roof.
It wasn't rational. You weren't a clue. You weren't connected to the loop as far as he could tell. You were just a person who sat on rooftops and said things that were honest without seeming to try very hard to be, and who looked at him in a way that felt different from how most people looked at Invincible, like you were trying to see the person rather than the suit.
He told himself it was because it was easy. He told himself a lot of things in the middle iterations.
He learned you the way you learn things when time doesn't count… carelessly, gratefully, in pieces that accumulated without him tracking it.
Your laugh first, because it was specific. Not a polite laugh, not a performed one — it arrived when it arrived and it was always slightly surprised, like you hadn't quite expected something to be funny, and something about that kept catching him off guard.
Then the way you thought. You took questions seriously — not the way people sometimes did, where seriously meant ponderous and slow — but in a quick, genuine way, like you actually wanted to find the real answer rather than just a good-sounding one. He'd say something halfway to a real thought and you'd take it the rest of the way and hand it back to him reshaped and he'd look at it and think oh. that's what I meant.
He learned that you came to the roof when you'd had the kind of day that needed air around it.
He learned that you were funnier than you let on in the first twenty minutes of knowing you.
He learned that you asked about him — not Invincible, not the hero stuff, him — with a directness that would have felt intrusive from anyone else and somehow didn't from you. Maybe it was because you answered his questions with the same directness, maybe because it felt like an exchange rather than an interview.
He learned that he felt, on that roof, like a version of himself that he'd been losing track of.
That one scared him more than the dying had.
Iteration thirty-something — deep in the loop, in the stretch where he'd stopped being careful about the rules he'd made for himself — he'd told you.
Not everything. Not at first. But you had both been on the roof past midnight, and you'd said something about wishing you could go back and do certain things differently, and something in him had cracked open around the edges and he'd said:
"What if you could. But you had to do everything differently. Not just the things you wanted to change."
You'd looked at him. Really looked.
"Is that what's happening?" you'd asked with a tilt of your head. Not what do you mean or that's not possible. Just — immediate comprehension, direct question.
He'd looked at the city for a long time.
"Yeah," he'd replied softly. "That's what's happening."
He'd told you in pieces, over the next three hours, and you'd listened to all of it — the dying, the resets, the way the middle of the loop had felt, the things he'd done that he couldn't justify except that consequence had started to feel theoretical. He'd told you things he hadn't said to anyone because anyone he could have said them to would have forgotten them by morning.
"I don't know how to care about things the right amount anymore," he'd admitted, at some point. "Like the — the dial is broken. I either care too much or I've trained myself not to care at all and I can't always tell which one I'm doing."
You'd been quiet for a moment.
"You came back to this roof," you'd guessed. "A lot, I'm guessing, based on how well you know me for someone I've apparently only met once."
"That's not someone who doesn't care," you'd stated with eyes full of conviction. "That's someone who found the one thing that still worked and held onto it."
He hadn't known what to do with that.
He still didn't, in the iterations that came after, carrying it into every reset like something too fragile to put down.
He'd told you his name in iteration thirty-one.
He'd thought about it for three iterations beforehand — not strategically, he wasn't running calculations about whether it was safe, he just kept opening his mouth and finding himself saying it before he'd decided to. On the thirty-first iteration he'd stopped fighting it.
"Mark," he'd stated finally. "My name is Mark."
And you'd said: You seem like a Mark.
Which wasn't an answer, which he'd known wasn't an answer, and he'd looked at you looking at him with that particular look — the one that saw him — and laughed until his stomach hurt.
He wasn't going to talk about how he broke it.
Not because it was heroic — it was, in its way, the thing he'd been building toward across dozens of iterations of collecting information and making mistakes and learning what didn't work — but because the cost of it was the kind of thing he hadn't let himself look at directly yet.
What mattered was that it broke.
Tuesday became Wednesday, for the first time, and the reset didn't come.
He lay on the floor of his apartment and waited for it and it didn't come and he waited more and it still didn't come and then he pressed his palms flat against the floor — the real floor, the permanent floor — and breathed.
The silence of a timeline that was only going to go forward.
It was the most terrifying thing that had happened to him in the entire loop, and that was saying something.
The problem with being Invincible after a time loop was that nobody knew.
William didn't know. His mom didn't know. Amber — and there was a whole complicated thing there that he couldn't think about yet — didn't know. Cecil didn't know, and Mark had mixed feelings about whether Cecil knowing would even be in the known column given what he'd learned about Cecil in the loop, but that was a separate issue.
Nobody knew that he'd lived the last however-long in a bubble of consequence-free repetition. Nobody knew what it had done to him. Nobody could see the way everything felt slightly unreal now that it was real, the way ordinary conversation felt like a test he wasn't studying for, the way every choice had this terrible new weight because he couldn't take it back.
He'd spent so long in the loop that the permanent timeline felt like the foreign one.
He had to keep reminding himself that when he said something now, people would carry it.
He had to keep reminding himself that when he made a mistake in the field, it would stick.
He had to keep reminding himself that the people he'd trained himself not to care about too much — the dial-is-broken thing — were real people in a real timeline who deserved to have someone who gave a damn about them looking out for them.
He was working on the dial.
His mom asked him what was wrong three days in.
He was helping with dishes, the ordinary Tuesday-night rhythm of it, and she'd turned from the sink and looked at him with the specific attention of someone who had been watching carefully.
"Nothing," he replied on instinct, "Long week."
His mother had this quality — she always had it but he'd forgotten, in the loop, in the long stretch of not being careful — of looking at him like she could see past the surface answer to the thing underneath. Not in a pressuring way. Just present. Just there.
"Nolan called," she said. Not a trap. Just information.
"I know." He'd seen the notification. He hadn't called back yet.
She didn't push. She went back to the dishes and let him stand there, and after a while he picked up a towel and dried things and the ordinary silence of it was something he felt in his chest like pressure releasing.
"If someone — if I knew something about you. Something you hadn't told me. Not because I was snooping, just because—" He stopped. This wasn't mapping onto reality very well. "If I knew you better than you knew I knew you. Would you want to know that?"
She was quiet for a moment. "Is this a real situation?"
"Hypothetically." She handed him a pot. "I think I'd want to know that you knew me," she mused. "Not necessarily the specific things. Just — that someone had seen enough of me to know me."
"Yeah," he replied, “Okay."
She looked at him sideways. "Are you sure nothing's wrong?"
"Working through some stuff," he admitted softly, "I'm okay."
She nodded, slowly. "Okay," she said, in the tone that meant I don't entirely believe you but I trust you to tell me when you're ready, and went back to the dishes.
He stood next to her and dried things and let the ordinary motion of it be enough for right now.
He went back on a Thursday.
He hadn't planned it. He'd told himself he wasn't going to… that was the loop, that was the old habit, and he was in a real timeline now and needed to let real things develop at their actual pace without the shortcut of knowing someone across thirty iterations.
He'd gone on patrol. The patrol had taken him east. The east route went past the roof.
He'd landed before he'd made the decision.
He stood there for a minute, feeling something he was going to call relief and not examine too closely, and then he sat down and looked at the city and tried to practice existing in a timeline that only went forward.
The city looked the same as it had in the loop. Of course it did. The loop hadn't changed the city.
He was sitting with that — the specific contours of what he'd become in thirty-seven iterations and whether it was reversible and what reversible even looked like — when he heard footsteps on the stairwell access.
He knew, before the door opened, that he knew those footsteps.
He'd been listening to them cross rooftops for longer than you'd been aware of him.
You came through the door and stopped when you saw him.
He watched you process it — surprise, then something more careful, then the settling into your own particular composure.
"Oh," you exclaimed, “Sorry, I didn't know anyone—"
"You're fine," he assured you with a gentle smile , "I was just—" He gestured at the city. "Route."
You looked at the skyline, then at him, with the look he'd catalogued across three dozen iterations — the one that was trying to see the person.
"Bad night?" you asked with a tilt of your head.
"Strange few weeks," he admitted with a sigh.
He watched you consider that, and watched you decide not to push.
You sat down on the ledge. It was the same spot, always the same spot, the place where you'd had thirty-seven conversations that you didn't know about — and looked out at the city.
He looked at you as you gazed out across the city.
I know you, said something in his chest that he didn't say. I know your laugh and the way you think and the thing you do when someone says something that actually lands, that half-second before you respond where I can see you actually received it. I know what you said to me in the dark of iteration thirty-something when I told you the dial was broken. I know you looked at me like I was a person and not a hero and I don't know how to explain what that cost me to leave behind every time the reset came.
I'm going to have to meet you.
I'm going to have to sit here and not use thirty-seven iterations of knowing you and let you be a stranger and let this be the first time, because it's the only time that counts and you deserve someone who's actually present in it.
That's the hardest thing I've ever been asked to do.
"I'm Mark," he offered simply, like it was the first time all over again.
You looked over. Something showed on your face that he couldn't read — something that came and went quickly.
"Y/N," you replied, a soft look on your face.
He nodded before turning to looked back at the city.
"Do you come up here a lot?" he asked, and hated how small it sounded, how insufficient, how thin a thread to start rebuilding something this heavy from.
"Starting to," you replied, "You?"
"It's on my route," he said simply.
You were quiet for a moment.
"Does it get easier?" you asked inquisitively, your head doing the tilt it always did when you wondered about something, "Whatever strange few weeks you're having."
He thought about it. Really thought — not the deflective answer, not the hero answer.
"I think you get better at carrying it," he stated honestly, “Not the same thing as easier."
"No," you mused simply, “Not the same thing."
You were looking at the city, your face in profile, the particular quality of your attention that he'd spent thirty-seven iterations learning to read.
Start somewhere, he told himself. She doesn't know you yet. That's not a loss, it's a beginning. Let it be a beginning.
"What brought you up here?" he asked, all while having to pretend he doesn’t already know the answer.
You considered the question. He recognized the rhythm of it — the taking-it-seriously quality, the actual search for the real answer.
"Needed to be somewhere that wasn't moving so fast," you stated barely above a whisper.
"Yeah," he nodded with a kind look, "I get that."
He meant it in ways he couldn't explain yet.
He was going to explain them. Not tonight — tonight was for starting, for the first careful thread of something real in a timeline that was going to hold — but eventually.
You were going to know why he'd meant it.
He was going to tell you.
Not because the loop had taught him that you were safe with the weight of it — though it had — but because in this timeline, the one that counted, he was going to choose to trust you with it.
That was the thing the loop hadn't been able to give him.
You stayed until the city got quiet.
He didn't leave when his patrol said he should.
When you finally stood to go you said "same time?" in a tone that was light and maybe-joking, an easy out if he didn't take it.
"Same time," he echoed with a soft laugh.
He watched you go down the stairwell.
He sat on the roof alone for a long time after, in the permanent un-resetting night, learning what it felt like to have something to look forward to that was going to stay.
It felt like standing on solid ground after a long time at sea.
Strange and necessary and a little overwhelming.
Written for my gorg Baddie Beta Reader: get well soon! Mwahh
prguitarman
andulkaphoto
dailybridgerton
pixelskylines
