How about a time loop AU where Phum doesn’t hit Peem’s painting in that first episode, so Phum and Peem never meet? A grave oversight the universe decides to promptly correct.
Peem doesn’t know what’s going on.
He is either stuck in the weirdest, most terrifyingly realistic nightmare he’s ever had. Or he’s stuck in the plot of a not particularly creative low-budget drama. Neither one of which sounds like much fun.
But, you see, yesterday. Or rather, the yesterday of yesterday’s yesterday, he had woken with the strangest feeling of déjà-vu. When he got up, he had been beyond confused to find his painting for the exhibition still in his room, settled on its easel as it’s been for the past week. You know, the painting he submitted for the art gallery just yesterday.
Upon closer, rather confused inspection, it turned out to not actually be the painting he submitted, if only because that one had been finished, while this one very much hadn’t been, still missing the finishing touches, still one day from completion.
Admittedly, he’d thought little of it, a little weirded out by the hyper-realistic dream that made him believe yesterday had already happened but happy enough to just write it off as possibly having overdone his usual burning of the midnight oil. Not that he’d stayed up particularly late the day before, having had to cancel on the celebration with his friends when Aunt Pui had to leave unexpectedly and left him to close up the café.
Instead, Peem stayed home, worked a little more on his painting, and then gone to sleep. A boring, ordinary evening. Followed by a strangely realistic sort of déjà-vu dream. Followed by the actual day. Yesterday. The yesterday of yesterday’s yesterday (and, yes, he is very much starting to also confuse himself).
That yesterday, the first yesterday-that-shouldn’t-be-today, he’d rushed through getting ready for the day, feeling like he took a step sideways somewhere without realizing, a vague sense of vertigo about the day, everything normal but also not, if only for ridiculously similar the entire day kept unfolding when compared to his dream. Still, he’d mostly been focused on getting his painting done for submission (irrespective of his brain trying to tell him that he already completed these finishing touches on his painting during his dream).
Although, instead of finishing his painting outside, as he’d originally planned, Peem had taken the canvas straight to their main classroom to finish. If only because that near miss from his dream still had him rather paranoid, the memory of a soccer ball flying barely past his painting with a mere breadth of hand to spare, still burned into his mind. He’d even vaguely giggled to himself while making his way across the campus much earlier that maybe his dream had been trying to warn him to be careful with his painting today. Maybe that’s it. If he were living in a movie where prophetic dreams and almost-real déjà-vus are real, of course.
The point is, he’d finished his painting with time to spare, submitted it for the gallery, and then continued being really weirded out by the day in its entirety, far too many things being too similar to his dream. Nothing spectacular, just an ordinary day as it had been the first time around, but also quite a number of conversations he is sure he already had in his dream, his classes that day sounding was too too familiar, as did Q’s little grumbling rant about his mentee’s antics, or even smaller things like that one girl laughing a little too shrilly during lunch in the cafeteria, that one bus running a red light while Peem was on his way home, the nice elderly couple asking him for direction while going to the supermarket for groceries later that evening.
He’d been glad when the day was over, strangely exhausted, glad to get back home and go to sleep. Clearly, he was just really tired. He just needed a good night’s sleep and tomorrow everything would be normal again and he would no longer feel like he somehow missed a step somewhere without noticing.
Only for him to wake to yet another yesterday.
Yesterday. Which is also today. Which was also the day before yesterday. And the day before that. And, the way it’s looking, tomorrow might be yesterday again.
It’s baffling. And terrifying.
Peem has no idea what’s going on and he very much wants out of this stupid dream.
Yesterday, as in yesterday’s yesterday, as in the third time he woke to find his painting once more beside his bed, once more unfinished, once more the same date blinking up at him from his phone, he went through the entire day with his eyes open, thinking he might be missing something essential, something that he is supposed to notice or do in order to get him out of this really really messed up dream. He didn’t find anything. Just an ordinary day, nothing notable about it at all.
To the contrary. Everything else, everyone else, seems perfectly normal, Aunt Pui, his friends, everyone at uni. He might suspect his friends of possibly playing a prank on him, for all that this sort of thing isn’t their usual kind of fun and that they’d never leave him floundering like this for so long. But there is also the sheer impossibility of his painting getting reset to the exact state he left it in the day before every time he wakes. Peem knows his own work. That’s his painting and no one touched it aside from himself. He is certain of that. For all that he has no idea what to do with that certainty, considering what it means for his current situation.
If anything, he’d be glad if this were indeed a prank. He’d be beyond delighted to have his friends jump out at him from around a corner and laugh at him, if only because he cannot, for the life of him, come up with any other reasonable explanations. You know, explanations that don’t include him being stuck in an endless dream, hallucinating, or having discovered the weirdest form of time travel ever.
None of which sounds great.
Peem just really really wants to wake up. Because, surely, all of this must be some really strange, really realistic, really messed up dream. Surely.
<>
Another yesterday later, four yesterdays in total, and he’s not particularly convinced of that fact any longer.
<>
“You keep reliving the same day?” Q sounds skeptical. Which is beyond reasonable. If Peem weren’t living it, he’d be doubtful as well. Hell, it took him four repetitions of the same day to even consider any of it being real beyond a scarily realistic dream.
“Or you are a figment of my imagination and I’m just stuck in some really terrifying nightmare,” Peem sighs in exhaustion, meeting Q’s gaze from underneath his hair, slumped as he is in front of his next class assignment. “Which I’m kind of hoping for, at this point. Either way, I’ve run out of ideas how to get myself out.”
“Hm,” his best friend hums, eyes on Peem, laser-focused, reading him like no one else in the world can. The silence stretches. “Alright,” Q finally nods, turned towards him and eyes sharp. “What have you tried so far?”
Because Q is the best, his very best friend, and he knows Peem, and he looks at Peem spouting ridiculous, crazy-sounding nonsense and simply believes him. Believes them because Peem is the one saying them. Because Q is Q and Peem is Peem and they are them. Because who else is Peem going to go to for help in getting out of an actual damn time loop, if not his best friend.
He breathes out, turns to reach into his bag and pull out the list he decided to begin writing out first thing in the morning when he woke to yet another yesterday the fourth day in a row.
Because, after only a few yesterdays he’s already starting to lose track of the individual yesterday’s specifics. And it’s terrifying him.
<>
Q has quite a number of ideas what they could try to get Peem out of dream/hallucination/timeloop, far more than Peem ever came up with. Their list only grows longer when they decide to also bring in their other friends yet another two yesterdays of unsuccessful deviations later.
They get together after everyone’s afternoon classes end and the three of them listen attentively, though far more skeptically than Q did, but they are still quick to throw out ideas to try and help, possibly convinced solely by Peem’s rather obvious distress at this point.
For the remainder of the day, Pun keeps texting him random ideas of what else Peem could try to fix the universe, Tan flails his way straight home to find some of the novels he has with this exact setting, spamming their group chat with pictures of various pages he thinks might have something useful, and Chain apparently decides to treat Peem’s situation with perfect seriousness, going on a research spree of anything he can find that looks even vaguely reasonable on the internet, adding his own line of summarizing paragraphs in their group chat whenever he thinks he came across something even vaguely relevant.
Peem adores his friends.
He listens attentively to their ideas, tries out their many suggestions as best he can.
None of it changes anything. Nine yesterdays in total and still the day keeps repeating and everyone keeps forgetting and Peem feels like his usual sense of calm might be starting to fray at its edges.
At this point, he’d do just about anything to fix whatever threw the universe off course.
Now, if only he could figure out just what that might be.