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He’s tried just about everything at this point.
The loops still keep coming.
The meteor drops, the people start singing, and he loses Charlotte.
Sooner or later he always loses Charlotte.
The first time he lost her to his own selfish stupidity- a damn shitty attempt at protecting himself from acknowledging his ‘feelings’.
After he lost her three, four, five times he stopped trying to pretend he doesn’t have them. Feelings. He definitely has them, and the more times he goes through this doomsday scenario the more overwhelming they become.
Ted starts to spend more time with Charlotte- well, more than he did before he first saw her singing at him from across the room, guts hanging out and flesh tinted blue.
He doesn’t leave her apartment before going to work. Sometimes he convinces her to take the day off and they enjoy whatever activity he can get them to do before, inevitably, the aliens catch up with them.
Once he convinced her to run away. Pack her things, leave her wedding ring and get out of Hatchedfield.
That was one of the worst loops yet; it proved he could have been so much more, so much better. But he hadn’t been when it counted.
He was still recovering from a rather 'unsuccessfull-to-say-the-least' loop this time around. Through trial and error he found out that things went rather smoothly without his intervening; a smooth slide right to his death.
This version of the day was already more than halfway over, so he had some time to experiment before his inevitable demise.
He’d try properly next time.
He’d waltzed into Charlotte’s shitty husband’s shitty rendition of a shitty power ballad many times, to see how he’d react- and how she’d react. If he came up and saved the day, if he saved her.
When he was too late she started to sing to him, and he hated that, when he was too early she just cried- an equally bad thing to happen- so Ted tried to be right on time to avoid both of those outcomes.
He’d taken the trash can lid with him this time, so he could simply finish off Sam’s open head for good when he headed back into the room where he’d left Charlotte after their ‘argument’.
Their little spat was something that simply occured naturally in most loops. It never had quite the same bite as the first one, though, since Ted put almost no emotion behind the harmful words he acted out to restore a situation he was familiar with.
With the way Charlotte snapped out of the trance Sam had had her under Ted supposed he was on time. He supposed wrong. There was something slimy on her hand. The blue of her eyes wasn’t the blue he loved.
She was obviously infected.
But she didn’t start singing.
This was new.
He dropped the goo-dripping lid and crossed the room to get to where she was standing in awe of what he'd done- or rather, in the midst of her apotheosis.
“Charlotte. Sit down with me.”
“Bu-ut Ted-”
“Don’t. Just sit down.”
His hands gently guided Charlotte to the floor. They were leaning their backs against the wall and Ted had spread his legs out far enough to kick the corpse of her dead husband should he so desire. It was unlikely that it would start moving again, but if it did it'd get the boot to the head.
“You know I love you, right?”
Silence. She still hadn’t started singing. He still wasn’t getting his hopes up.
The Hive was just programming a response, and that took a while when something truly surprising happened.
Like a known sleazeball professing his love after murdering someone’s husband.
“Loved you all the way. Start to finish. When we kissed after that christmas party to when you had your guts ripped out.”
“Guts ripped out…? I had my guts...ripped out?”
Ted smiled, sensing from within Charlotte’s voice the confusion of both her and the hive. In this version of reality her stomach was still soundly intact.
“Yup, many, many times, but that’s not important right now...You know, I’ve never done this before. Sat down, had a talk with you like this. I mean I suggested talking along with relaxing and fucking earlier, but we never seem to do it in that order.”
He intertwined their fingers between them, with absolutely no reaction from not-Charlotte besides an empty stare.
“It’s not your fault, of course, that we don't talk. ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’- you know? I just don’t enjoy talking about...stuff. Like Sam, being with you, not being with you, loving you- fuck, I’ve never used that word this often in any of my lifetimes.”
Ted looks into the hive creature’s face and suddenly cannot help himself- even if these aren’t her eyes, these are still very much her lips. And they’re still, without a doubt, his favorite part of her.
"It's true, though. Only took a littletoo long to realise."
He knows what it will do to him- kissing her in this state, but he doesn’t care.
“I love you.”
When they part Ted hears the first notes of a lovely little duet in the back of his head. Something he might sing with the real, alive version of Charlotte in a reality where he finally broke the loop and saved the day.
Better luck next time.