ELLIPSE. @d3spite
she wakes up with a jolt, like a fitful sleep chasing her back into consciousness, pulse drumming the last beats of a waiting dirge. only this isn’t a nightmare she’s waking up from, it’s a nightmare she wakes into.
xiuying squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, not wanting to see the inevitable. it hasn’t happened yet. it’s going to be 1:43pm, when she checked the time that last loop, and they’ll pass by the bent tree before the bridge in less than twenty seconds. there isn’t a stop in between that she can get off at. trust her, she’s tried. she’s going to try to get the bus to stop anyway. or get everyone out of the bus. it’s not going to work, again, because at 1:49pm, the bus will jerk, like the freefall feeling of waking up, but all that’ll be there when they do is a blaze of white-hot pain.
then she’s going to open her eyes again, and re-live the same seven minutes. she’s done it four times now. restart round?
her phone reads 1:42pm instead. eyebrows furrow; she’d only checked the time once, in those four rounds. she’s got one more minute than before. is this a boost? or a new level difficulty? it doesn’t matter, because an extra minute still means a better chance of stopping the explosion. though she makes a note to check for the time if ( when ) the next loop happens.
but she can’t waste this one minute. xiuying rushes to stand up, and smacks her face into a detestably familiar shoulder. annoying mini boss that is zhao kejian. why is she even on this bus? “get lost,” she snaps in their mother tongue, but restrains pettily shoulder-checking the delinquent as she tries to move past her. she’d wasted precious minutes on her second loop yelling at kejian, then they’d all gotten blown up, and she’s not falling for that misdirection again. zhao kejian’s gotten in her way every single loop, and now this one, too?
“you’re not even supposed to be awake yet,” she grumbles under her breath, but of course, what wouldn’t zhao kejian do to make her life difficult?










