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Your name is Dirk Strider. A year ago you legally adopted a teenager. The government went and named the kid David, but you just call him Dave. So far you've had no complaints.
Since then, things have been one crazy fucking rollercoaster. You don’t have steady income or a long-term partner, and you rent this cheapass apartment on the top floor of a high rise in a building with an elevator that only works alternating Thursdays between the hours of 2:21 and 2:23 a.m.
By all means, you should have been exempt from guardianship on account of your OCD, raging anxiety, and general struggle with narcissism. Instead, you get to remind Kid Super BO that he needs to shower more than once a week, and your grocery bill has never been higher considering you have a black hole for a ward sleeping less than twenty feet away from you.
Regardless, you don’t think you’d change a thing. The kid’s adorable and he makes you laugh. Plus, he needed a home, and if not you, then someone else, and that was something your underdeveloped conscience couldn’t let slide.
There’s also the issue of your kid brother having time powers. Or so the government claims. When you read Dave’s file and the agent filled you in on the boy’s condition, you thought they were describing some kind of delusion he had and there was a bigger, undiagnosed demon working behind the curtain, like schizophrenia or some kind of shitty manic disorder.
The agent grimly assured you that Dave’s powers were very real, and you were urged to contact the agency “in the event of emergencies or concerning developments.” A day later, you signed the last of the paperwork and Dave went home with you. You didn’t believe jackshit the government told you, but you said whatever you needed to get a traumatized thirteen-year-old out of federal custody. At the very least, you vowed to yourself to keep a close eye on Dave for any signs of a worsening mental state.
You should have believed her.
You’re returning home after an emergency trip to the corner convenience store for some Doritos, when just outside the apartment building’s door a glint of blinding sunlight from above catches your eye. You look up, and your blood goes cold.
Your kid brother, only fourteen years old, is sitting on the ledge of the roof, a katana in his lap.
You spit out a curse and shock the rosary off a nearby passing old woman. You don’t stay to offer any apologies, wrenching open the building door and sprinting as fast as you can to the elevator. Out of order.
You break for the stairs.
Ten floors later, you burst onto the roof. Hunched over and wheezing, you drop the plastic bag of junk food by the door and stumble across the gravel towards Dave.
“One minute and seventeen seconds.”
“What?” You come up to his right and drop onto the flat concrete lip, panting hard and sweat dripping in your eye.
“That’s how long it took you to climb the stairs. A minute, seventeen.” He looks over at you, and his face would be totally unreadable if you hadn’t been the one to teach him how to control his emotions. He’s scared.
“You time me, did ya?” You keep a much cooler exterior, deciding you need to collect more data before jumping to the extremes.
“Something like that,” he mumbles and just as quickly looks away again. His hand grips the handle of the katana tighter.
“Yeah, well, cardio ain’t exactly my thing or I’da been here sooner.”
“Sorry.”
“Come on. Let’s get inside ‘fore the sun cooks us both. Lord knows you’d turn redder than a fucking lobster and I ain’t treating no burns.”
You stand up, but Dave doesn’t move. You give him time to swing his legs over the ledge, exercising far more patience than you have, but the kid is frozen. Then, one second he’s barely clinging to his mask, and the next he’s bawling. Like, full on tears and sobs, gutwrenching sounds of pure unadulterated misery. He clutches the sword, and you stand there, gaping like an idiot. He’s never cried like this before. You have no fucking clue what to do.
First things first, you decide to ignore any semblance of physical boundaries painfully established in the year prior and you wrap your arms around Dave and drag him away from the ledge. You and him drop to the sharp gravel, and not a second later Dave returns the hold with a proper hug around your middle, squeezing you impossibly tight.
He tries to bury his snotty, tear-streaked face in your shoulder, and you remove his shades for him to be able to really dig himself in and smear fluids on your last clean polo. Apparently, you don’t really need to do much else except hold him until he stops shaking like a rich woman’s soaked purse dog.
“What’s wrong, li’l man?” you ask.
Dave gasps and heaves trying to form words. “I can’t do this anymore, I don’t wanna do it anymore.”
“Do what, Dave?” It’s getting harder to maintain your cool, but you manage to get the question out in what you hope is a casual, non-judgemental tone.
“Every morning I wake up and it’s today. Over and over and over and over, and I can’t take it anymore, I’m going fucking insane. I’ve tried everything but tomorrow never comes,” he mumbles and sniffles. You shift until he emerges from your shoulder, eyes glassy and red and nose just dripping clear snot.
“Kid, you know I love hearing you work on your sick rhymes and that kickass poetry stuff you write, but you’re not making a lick of sense right now.”
That gets a weak laugh out of him, which you count as a win. He wipes under his eyes and tries valiantly to get himself back under control, but there isn’t a reality where he’s honed his natural Strider abilities that much yet. For now, he keeps sniffling and blinking out these massive crocodile tears.
“Every morning when I wake up, I write a number on my arm.” He sticks out his left arm and rolls up his sleeve for you to see the small 67 written on his inner arm in black pen. “It’s been April 13th sixty-seven days in a row. No matter what I do, it never becomes April 14th. At midnight, it’s like I magically wake up in bed and it’s still the 13th. I don’t know how to make it stop- I don’t know how to turn it off- I can’t—”
Before he gets himself worked up again, you jostle him with the arm you have around his shoulder. It shuts him up.
“Calm your tits there, bro. You saying this is, like, a Groundhog Day situation?”
“What’s Groundhog Day?”
You can only stare because you’re once more reminded that your brother was a ward of the feds for the first thirteen years of his life with no access to pop culture or really any kind of media. Also, you’ve clearly failed him if he’s been with you a year now and doesn’t know these kinds of things. You bring shame to the Strider name.
Slapping him onto the back, you stand up and walk over to the abandoned plastic bag of chips and soda. With a simple jerk of your head, Dave stands up and retrieves the katana and follows you down the flight of stairs to your apartment.
You drop the bag of garbage food onto the counter and pull out the wet cans of no-longer-cold orange soda you picked up. You toss one to Dave and crack open the other one for yourself.
“Groundhog Day is the story of news reporter Bill Murray getting stuck in a time loop on the second of February, Groundhog Day,” you start summarizing, heading over to the futon. Dave trails behind like the lost little puppy he is. “He spends the time in various ways, at first trying to break free of the loop, then learning news skills and seducing a female coworker of his and trying to change the future.”
Dave sits down next to you. He holds the can of orange soda like a lifeline, Pandora’s box of not freaking the fuck out, and if he opens it, shit gets real.
“How long was he stuck in the loop?”
The tremor in his voice clues you further into his delicate mental state. You’re not sure how you completely missed a decline this rapid. It feels like it happened over night. Yesterday you ordered a pizza for dinner, dicked around on your xBox for a while, then sent him to bed around 10 p.m., like the responsible fucking guardian you are. Now, the little man is crumbling apart in front of your eyes.
You chug a third of your drink to stall for time. “I dunno. Long enough for inane 90s grade shenanigans.” The room falls silent while you pull up Netflix. You mooch off the downstairs neighbor’s account in exchange for moving your strifes with Dave to the roof.
You sneak glances to your left every now and then to gauge if you need to change tactics. He’s mostly calmed down, picking at the tab. His shades are hooked on the collar of your polo. He’ll get them back once you’ve worked through whatever the hell he’s got going on. Unfortunately, in the meantime, you are stuck being exposed to the full power of his sad little eyes that hold an irritating amount of influence over you.
Netflix has the movie, thank fuck, and you put it on. You take another drink of delicious crisp nectar, stifle a burp, then plow forward into a dangerous territory: emotions. Eugh.
“Sixty-seven days according to your ink and I never once brought up Groundhog Day?” you probe, raising an eyebrow. You don’t know where you land on the story Dave is spinning, but you play along to gather intel. This could be the sign you were looking for, in which case you have a few phone calls to make and a psychologist to find who hasn’t banned you from their practice.
“I don’t always tell you. It gets… tiring, explaining it over and over again. This is the longest you’ve entertained me about it all. You think I’m lying.” It’s not an accusation. It’s the defeated tone of someone who’s sick of always being right.
A part of you rushes to defense, but you reel back hasty Dirk and employ smart Dirk.
“I think I can’t help you until I know more.”
Dave opens his soda. “Didn’t the agent lady tell you what’s wrong with me?”
“She told me you were a special kid, and she was right. You’re one cool kid. Couldn’t ask for a better brother,” you smirk and reach out a gloved hand to ruffle his hair. He swats you away, an angry curl on his lips.
“That’s not an answer. You’re deflecting because you think I’m crazy, but I’m not!” He shifts onto his knees, voice raising into a low shout. “I have lived through sixty-seven different timelines, sixty-seven days of me trying everything to break free. I’ve survived dozens of different realities, and all while knowing it didn’t matter because in the morning it’d all reset. Do you know how- how debilitating that is? How crippling futility is? I am stuck reliving the same day. I’m tired. ”
The tears are back, silently streaming down his face. His breathing is shaky and uneven.
Your kid brother is one hell of an orator. Speeches like that, he could get into movies with that level of shit. It makes sense with all his cameras he likes to play with.
Lifting your can of soda, you measure the kind of response you want to give. “What number am I thinking of? Count ‘a three. One, two, three—”
“Sixty-nine,” you both say at the same time. You raise an eyebrow. Coincidence. Of course you’d say the funny number.
“Again. One, two, three—”
“Four-twenty.”
“Dammit!” you curse. “I’m too predictable.”
Dave snorts. He sags against the thin cushion of the shitty futon. “Yeah, this also isn’t the first time you had me guess what stupid number you’re thinking of.”
“One more. One, tw—”
“It’s fifty-six. Then two. Then negative eleven. Then sixteen thousand, four hundred and ninety-one. Then you get into decimals for a while. Then you try to get me with pi. Do I have you convinced now?”
You flip him the bird, fragile pride a little wounded. It’s frustrating when you can feel it but still not help the way being shown up pisses you the fuck off. But if what he’s saying is true, it’s not because Dave is smarter than you; he’s just played this game with you before. Get a grip, Dirk.
“Sure. Now shut up and watch the movie. You might learn something.”
You get as far as the scene where obligatory hot female has to identify Bill Murray’s body at the morgue. Dave laughed at a few of the jokes and gags, all the kind of stuff a youngling Strider might find funny, but the longer the movie played, the more Murray’s depression wasn’t played for laughs, the quieter Dave got.
His breathing turns shallow. Seeing the corpse of a man driven to suicide really fucks him up, you think. In the blink of an eye, you’ve snatched up the remote and turned off the TV. In the implosion of silence rushing back into your tiny ass living room, you realize Dave’s been mumbling under his breath, over and over, “Turn it off, turn it off, turn it off.”
You let him into your arms again, wondering if you made a mistake showing him the movie. You have been known to make those occasionally.
“You’re okay, dorkatron. Keep breathing ‘fore you go and make yourself puke,” you mutter. You glance out the window and take note of the sun going down, the sky and its clouds turning a scarlet red. Midnight is less than five hours away.
He’s nearly hyperventilating when you talk him through the worst of it. He squeezes his left wrist, over the black pen ink. A feeling nags at the base of your skull, something like ‘this is far above your pay grade’ and ‘he’s just a kid’ and ‘he might actually have time powers’ , but a solution to all this crap eludes you. You don’t suppose you could give the li’l man a lesson in compartmentalization, could you?
No, bad Dirk, that is a bad guardian decision. Think. Just do whatever Dave would want to hear.
“How ‘bout this, li’l man, you stay out here with me tonight. A change ‘a scenery might do you good. I should warn you, though, I do karate in my sleep.”
That gets his attention, eyes wide, doe-like. “You’d… let me do that?”
“Only for tonight,” you say gruffly. “This bed is usually only reserved for myself and fly hunnies. Are you a fly hunny, Dave?”
“Yes!”
“Wrong. Go pull out the pizza from yesterday.”
“No, no, absolutely not, I am sick of pizza. Please can we get something else?” Dave surprises you by declining day-old cold pizza, his favorite! But giving it an additional moment of thought, it occurs to you two months of nothing but cold pizza in the fridge would make anyone revolt.
You stare at him to see if he’ll change his mind, but the kid is stubborn at all the worst times.
“Get my phone and wallet,” you sigh, rubbing your forehead while the kid leaps up to do that. You’re going to have to snag more DJing gigs if you continue to be this soft pussy ass bitch any time you see those pitiful peepers.
You return Dave’s shades when he comes back with your stuff. Not many places are delivering this late except for the Chinese place run by the crabby woman.
“If you tip really good, Li might deliver the food to our door,” Dave says from behind the futon, looking over your shoulder as you fill out the online order.
You burst out laughing.
Twenty minutes later, Dave slams the apartment door shut behind him and drops the bag of takeout on the counter, growling his funny little kid swears under his breath. He kicks off your massive pair of slides and begins pulling out some plates. A year ago, you didn’t believe in things such as cutlery or dinner plates. You don’t have a dining table or a dishwasher, and you definitely didn’t have anyone to share a meal with. Then Dave came along, and the domestic life was shoved up your ass.
You put something else on to watch as the two of you eat on the futon. Dave seems to be in a considerably lighter mood, able to make awful jokes and bizarre, somewhat off putting metaphors while shoveling fried rice in his pie hole. You stick to eating in silence, as you’ve always preferred.
Come nighttime, you force the brat to brush his teeth. Once he leaves the bathroom, you step in and lock the door behind you, posture sagging. You tug off your cap and sunglasses, dropping them onto the toilet lid, and a heavy groan escapes as you rub your eyes.
This… parenting shit is kinda fucking hard. Your kid’s stuck in a time loop? He’s scared, he’s given up hope for a tomorrow, he feels like his life is spiraling out of control. What in the fresh hell are you supposed to do to fix this?
You’re an extremely vain person. You know this. You’ve even been able to admit it to yourself a few times. But deep down, way fucking deep down, sometimes you feel just as lost as that fourteen-year-old kid. He’s looking to you for answers and guidance, and you’re- you’re not doing enough. You’re doing it all wrong. He should have been picked up by Mr. and Mrs. White Picket Fence and been some happy, clueless dumbass teenager.
With you, he’s trying so hard to be someone who makes you proud, and you don’t know if you can live up to that burden, being someone’s hero and all that.
What do you do, Dirk? What the fuck do you do?
You splash some cold water on your face, slap some goddamn sense back into you, and brush your own goddamn teeth, too, because you are one dope ass role model.
Dave is setting up the futon when you walk back to the living room. He’s such a cute kid, it makes you violent some days. You quietly join him in throwing together some pillows and sheets, and once made, Dave lies down on the futon and stretches out in a way that lets you know you’re going to have to fight for space tonight. You turn off the lights, quickly followed by the sounds of two simultaneous clicks as you both remove your shades and set them off to the side.
“Night, Bro,” Dave says, almost immediately turning onto his side and putting his back to you.
“Night, Dave. Tomorrow’s gonna come, you’ll see. An’ when it does, you gotta clean the bathroom top to bottom. Mark my words.”
——
You wake up at 5 am on the dot. You prefer to squeeze in a workout in the morning before attempting to be a productive semblance of an adult. For better or worse, Dave wanted to be homeschooled his first year with you, so while you don’t have to worry about getting a teenager ready for school, you do have to mind how loud you are while getting yourself ready, half-groggy and already pissed off.
You head to the local gym that you shell out twenty bucks a month to use their crappy weights and dubiously stained benches. It’s mostly empty, which is how you prefer. Nobody would bother you anyway, but it’s the principle.
After punishing yourself to several failures, you swing by a nearby market to pick up some groceries so maybe you can actually make something fresh for Dave, then you head back to the apartment. The stairs kick your ass because Strider’s never skip leg day, and this juicy ass doesn’t happen by itself, but you sense something is off the moment you step onto your floor and slip the key into the lock.
You furrow your brows, hesitating before opening the door. You feel like you’re forgetting something.
You shrug when whatever it is doesn’t come to you, and you open the door.
Dave comes bounding across the living room and kitchen and properly football tackles you back into the hallway. You grunt, the air in your lungs forcefully expelled by a teenager bashing his skull into your diaphragm in his frantic scramble to… hug you?
You heft the bags of groceries out of the way and wonder what the fuck is going on. Is he deranged? Was there a near-death experience while you were gone?
“Woah, ease off there, li’l man, I am ripe as hell.”
Willingly or not, Dave extracts himself and sniffles. His cheeks glisten in the morning sunlight streaming through the east window.
“Sorry, I just… it worked! It worked, it’s tomorrow, it’s the 14th!” He runs a hand through his gnarly bedhead and starts pacing. “Oh my god, oh my god, I have no clue what I did differently this time. What if it happens again and I don’t know how to break it? I don’t even know what triggered it in the first place, how do I stop it from happening again? I don’t—”
“Quit the fret, bro. You’re losing your cool,” you say, barely able to keep up with his fast rambling and aimless pacing. You jam an elbow into his back and herd him inside. You drop the bags onto the counter and start pulling out boxes and cans.
Dave clears his throat and wipes his face. “Sorry. I’m just… I’ve never been so h-happy.”
You pause in reading the instructions on the box of pancake mix, turning to aim a raised eyebrow. You can’t tell if that’s a good or sad thing. You know next to nothing about his time before he became your brother—he never, ever talks about it and you don’t ask—but it’s a good thing he’s happy, right? You’re not screwing this up?
“See, told you it would work out. Pancakes to celebrate, how ‘bout that,” you say. From an upper cabinet, you dodge all the ninja stars embedded in the cheap cardboard wood and pull out a mixing bowl.
“Sweet,” Dave says, still fighting a smile but mostly under control now.
“Yeah, and you can get started on that bathroom while I cook. Chop chop now, the faster you finish, the sooner you eat.”
His smile falls. "Not sweet.”
You reach into another bag and pull out a bottle of apple juice. The crackhead he is lights up again like a Texas Fourth of July.
“That sweeten the pot for ya?” you ask, barely repressing a snort.
“That it does, brother. You’re, like, kind of the best right now.”
“Yeah, yeah, get out of my sight.” You shove him away by the head towards the bathroom he in no way agreed to clean. Sometimes this ‘raising a kid’ stick has some benefits. And it’s certainly not lacking in ego boosts you don’t need.
Now, time to try not to fuck up these pancakes.