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Week I
Coriolanus reaches for the parameters of the days. It’s like wading through the dark. He memorizes everything. After all, it’s simple reconnaissance. He confirms the situation to be what it is: a time loop. Recognizes it for what it is. Sees it for what it is.
He only reacts passively, testing boundaries, testing if everything truly resets, if he can escape geographically if not temporally.
His findings?
He cannot cross out of the 12’s boundaries.
He cannot return to the Capitol.
All attempts to buy a train ticket are foiled.
These are the confines of the loop. The suspension is contained in 12 alone, like one tone of a chromatic scale. Not much can be made of it, but he knows that under these conditions, if anything else in Panem is affected, at least the Districts won’t be able to unite, and the rebels won’t flee if the constraints he’s subjected to apply to all the rest of 12's inhabitants.
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Week II
He realizes he could have written to Strabo to excuse his son, and does this time, but the letter doesn’t reach Strabo in time.
He concludes, or nearly does, that Sejanus’ death is inevitable, and realizes this loop is to his advantage—as long as time is suspended, he is immortal and unable to be convicted.
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Week III
The third week and on, Coriolanus falls into a routine. He wakes before the sun, hauls himself out of bed, and dumps the gun in 12’s lake. He greets Lucy Gray by the water and returns to his bunk safely.
A few days later, he arrives early to the execution, his ears plugged with wet clay from the riverbank. The squelching discomfort and grime is worth not hearing “Ma!” every time. And this time, he picks up a stray length of rope, coiled like a snake in the gravel.
Every time, he turns away. Every time, he feels the fleeting fear he could be next, senses something amiss in his gut. Yet, cognitively, he has reassurance, for as long as the loop will go on. The loop won’t fall through, and neither will he, through that platform.
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Week V
Coriolanus confronts Lucy Gray with news of the loop, seeking counsel. He has a moral dilemma. A decision suffocating him. He had not even realized the dilemma was moral until she opened her mouth.
She sits, waiting for him to broach the subject he seems so feverish over.
And he has to remind himself that it's safe to speak. She will forget it all by tomorrow, anyway. So, he lays it all out. The time loop. The jabberjays. Sejanus.
All is silent for a moment.
“Why—deepest hell, Coriolanus,” she stammers, face heating. “I-I don’t know. But I trust in your judgment.” A strained smile crosses her face—but he’s not looking at her, not now. He’s looking at the rope he’s been fiddling with for the past week as if he’s never seen it before.
Still, she worries the hem of his mother’s sunrise-orange scarf, as if she too can sense the eternity she’ll face due to him. Not that she’ll know when the time rolls by.
He doesn’t know she knows he only came for validation, to affirm a predetermined verdict and outcome. Though she doesn’t say anything more.
At last, she bids him farewell and leaves him to stew over the “dilemma” herself. He does not sleep and by sunrise, it’s clear he has but one option.
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Week VII
He writes to Tigris, but a return letter never comes. Instead, the same letter returns, unopened, bleeds crimson ink with RETURN TO SENDER—12’s insignia emblazoned on it. The stamp, bold, and in its totality, unambiguously indelible, marring the coherence of his words contained within, almost recalls the exact shade of Academy rouge, Coriolanus thinks faintly—a state he'll never return to, so distant that it may as well have been another life.
Even the letter he sends to Dr. Gaul through official Peacekeeper channels is a fruitless transaction, but he knows he’ll be recompensed with the selfsame extra coins he spent on higher-priority stamps next week, the contents of his nightstand reverted.
Indeed, all transit and communication lines have been halted by order of the Capitol, “until further notice”—but he’s the only one who knows what that means, the only one who can see the full extent of how in line these restrictions are with his own entrapment.
Even his mail cannot leave while he’s in the loop, just as his body cannot. And despite it all, the delimitations, the script—self-preservation is worth the price of isolation from fellow man. Besides, during his Academy days, he would always work alone, whenever allowed. This… experiment wasn’t any different.
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Week IX
By now, he’s got his routine down flawlessly and operates with machine-like efficiency. Sejanus’ screams are always drowned out, and before the week ends, in the aftermath, he never initiates unnecessary conversation. He’s all but running—not unlike the trains, undergoing regular maintenance yet never peeling off track or pulsing forward due to the notice it has taken him seven weeks to observe.
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Week XIII
He realizes it’s become more than routine, this existence. He’s numb to everything by now, but he still turns away out of simple habit. Or is it?
He quells the thought before it has the chance to live, to fully articulate itself.
Is he living through a reduplication of all military life, of all time? Ma, Ma, Ma—it hasn’t stopped ringing since the first.
Yes. Certainly that’s all it is. He suspects his father must have felt like this once, inured to all and any death after repeated exposure. It was only nature.
And—it only made sense that he was chosen to be judge, jury, and proverbial executioner of this loop. Only he possessed a mind higher than all of 12, only he could ordain what was and wasn’t to happen—no wonder he was alone through it all! His judgment was master and sovereign as he was the only individual capable of decisive impartially—nevermind Lucy Gray who deferred to him and Sejanus who was stunted by his constant, bleeding heart.
Coriolanus was the fittest to endure. He was not bound to be selected against like Sejanus was with the boy’s persistent tendency to thrust himself into the line of fire. And if it was all Sejanus’ fault, wasn’t it only fair that he suffer due consequences? Coriolanus’ reality was so fixed and right, that he needn’t even administer punishment—it just happened on some cosmic level. In fact, he hadn’t even needed to lift a finger, not since he’d pulled the trigger in the Hob.
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Week XLII
It isn’t like Coriolanus to contemplate the meaning of life on such a regular basis, but when all else is still, his thoughts are more… prone to cyclical movement.
The holes in his socks did not, strictly speaking, need to be darned because they would undo themselves by the end of the week, and still, he took pleasure in rectifying what little he could, else he’d have to focus on what he’d decided on long ago, what still lay desperately out of his hands, his chronically tied hands.
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Week L
In the weeks leading up to their “anniversary,” the anniversary of Sejanus' sentence and eventual execution, Coriolanus does small good deeds. Brings gumdrops and popcorn to Maud Ivory, does Lucy Gray favors, spends time with Sejanus, his friend, lest he forget, before the inevitable—
He changes all save the one intervention that counts, that which could destabilize his own fate, as if to atone for what he cannot—will not—cannot do.
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Week LII
It dawns on Coriolanus that it isn’t the anniversary of Sejanus’ death. For the first time in a year, he has been wrong about something. The feeling sits ill at ease in the pit of his stomach, like vipers awakening just to writhe around and ruin his time at it, his first go at living.
Correction: By now, it would have been the anniversary of Sejanus’ first death, if the passage of time had continued without disruption. But instead, Sejanus will die once again.
Let the record show, that he, Coriolanus Snow, was absolved, that, likewise, an anniversary isn’t worth commemorating if it was indistinct from all the other times, all other occurrences—meaning, he’d never done, let alone, not done, anything worth condemning.
All he hadn’t done had become clockwork, as regular and smooth and commonplace as the dusk of each day. He’d allowed nature to take its course. And retread its course. And reaffirm his dominance like the divine right of kings.
And thus, Snow reckons with two facts, two fundamental elements that will remain no matter what:
Fact: He will always report.
It is his sworn duty to uphold to the Capitol, literally part of his Peacekeeping vows, for better or for worse, for, any week, in any futurity, the loop could break and he will never be caught in the fraught position of "accomplice." And besides, he could never live without absolute security as long as he could be the next neck on the chopping block, marked as disgustingly expendable.
If he does not? Well, he doesn’t want to entertain the possibility. Naturally, he isn’t expendable and the possibility ceases to exist.
Fact: Sejanus always dies.
This is Coriolanus’ reality now. He’s had the chance to learn to love his fate, resigned to it as he was, and he does. Love it. He does.
Poor Sejanus. Poor, sensitive, foolish, dead Sejanus. But Coriolanus will always have the time to say goodbye. The luxury of time everyone else beneath him is bereft of.
Every time. That is certain. And that makes up for it:
Every time he eschews cutting the noose that is his lifeline.