Lance slouched deeper into the worn armchair, searching for a comfortable position in the library's third-floor nook. Sunlight streamed through tall Gothic windows, casting warmth on the burgundy carpet and long shadows across the mahogany bookshelves. His borrowed copy of The Great Gatsby lay open in his lap, pages slightly yellowed and corners softened by countless readers. The spine was cracked from years of academic exploration. The aroma of aged volumes, dancing dust, and weathered leather enveloped him as he settled in for a tranquil Saturday lost in pages.
A student two tables away typed softly on their laptop, the gentle clicking a soothing backdrop. Someone coughed in the distance, pages rustled, and the radiator beneath the window hissed quietly, pushing back against the October chill.
“During those formative years of youth and impressionability...” Lance began, his eyes tracking Fitzgerald's carefully crafted prose. The words flowed smoothly, painting pictures of green lawns and white palaces—until—
Pressure built behind his eyes, familiar and dreaded. Colors smeared like wet paint across his vision. Reality yanked backward with the force of a giant rubber band snapping.
“During those formative years of youth and impressionability...”
Lance blinked. Same page. Same words. Same sunbeam warming his left shoulder. The laptop user's typing hadn't changed rhythm. The library remained as silent and still as always, untouched by his looping experience. He continued reading, careful not to miss anything. Maybe there was some hidden significance, some deeper meaning he needed to uncover in this passage—
Reset.
“During those formative years of youth and impressionability...”
“Oh, come on,” Lance muttered, earning a stern look from a bespectacled student nearby who clutched their sociology textbook like a shield. He gripped the book tighter, knuckles whitening, focusing intently on each word. Perhaps if he read it slowly enough, dissecting every sentence with precision...
Reset.
By the fifth iteration, Lance started taking notes. He pulled out his tablet, its screen reflecting the afternoon light as he created detailed character maps and relationship webs. Green arrows connected Gatsby to Daisy, their paths intersecting and diverging like temporal lifelines. Red lines tracked Tom's movements through the novel, weaving a web of violence and privilege. Blue circles highlighted Nick's observations, each annotated with possible symbolic meanings. His artistic training surged as he sketched scene layouts, visualizing the exact positioning of characters during key moments—the precise angle of Gatsby's reach toward the green light, the arrangement of chairs at his lavish parties.
Reset.
“What am I missing?” he whispered to the unchanging pages, his voice barely audible above the radiator's hiss. "Why this book? Why now? What's the cosmic significance of Nick Carraway's existential crisis?"
During the tenth loop, he called Emma, his voice hushed in the library's quiet. The phone felt slick in his sweating palm as he paced between the Renaissance Literature shelves. "Hey, what do you know about green lights as symbols? Specifically in terms of their relationship to cyclical time and eternal recurrence?"
"Lance, it's 3 AM," she mumbled, her voice thick with sleep.
"Oh. Right. Sorry." He glanced at his watch: 2:47 PM. Wait. What?
Reset.
In the next iteration, he hesitated before calling. "Emma, quick question about Jazz Age symbolism—"
"What are you talking about?" she asked, confusion evident in her voice. "That’s so random."
He ran a hand through his increasingly disheveled hair. "Never mind. Just forget it."
Reset.
He called Maya to the library during loop fifteen after a few hours of reading and analysis without a reset, hoping her artist's eye might catch something he'd missed. She studied his complex diagrams with growing concern, her blue-streaked hair falling forward as she leaned over the scattered papers and digital renderings spread across the sturdy oak table.
"Lance, are you okay? This seems... intense. Even for an art student's analysis."
He showed her his digital recreation of the Valley of Ashes, rendered in muted grays and browns, with Doctor T.J. Eckleburg's eyes looming over the desolate landscape. "See how the eyes watch over everything? It's like time itself is watching, judging, resetting—" He caught himself, noting her worried expression. "Never mind. You won't remember this anyway."
"Remember what?" she asked, but the world was already smearing into reset.
Jasper contributed his own theories during loop twenty, his enthusiasm surrounding Lance’s claims of a time loop making everything worse as he bounced around. "Maybe it's like that movie Inception, but with books! Or what if Gatsby is actually a time traveler? That's why he got so rich! He probably bought Apple stock in 1922!"
"Jasper, please," Lance groaned, head in his hands, surrounded by stacks of literary criticism and historical analysis. "That's not helping."
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Reset.
His nook became a shrine to literary analysis every loop. Post-it notes covered every surface in a rainbow of academic desperation, color-coded by theme: yellow for wealth, pink for romance, green for time paradoxes. String connected various plot points on the walls, red yarn creating a web that resembled a conspiracy theorist's breakdown more than academic study. Different editions of the novel lay scattered across his desk—paperback, hardcover, annotated, illustrated—some highlighted, others marked with frantic handwriting, a few torn apart and reassembled like a literary jigsaw puzzle. He’d long learned how to dissuade the librarian from interfering.
The nearby student watched his descent into obsession with growing alarm, their laptop forgotten. "Um, maybe you should take a break? Get some fresh air? Touch grass?"
"Why, of course you can!" Lance mumbled, adding another green light reference to his master timeline, now stretched across three tables. "There has to be a reason. Nothing's random anymore."
Reset.
Lance tried reading the book backwards, translating each page into reverse chronological order. Then sideways, holding the book at precisely ninety-degree angles. Then while standing on his head, blood rushing to his face as he squinted at the swimming text. He read it in different locations—various library floors, his room, the cafeteria, the quad under autumn trees, and the clock tower room (which, traitorously, remained locked). He read it in different voices, accents, and speeds—from glacially slow to auctioneer-rapid.
He wrote papers analyzing every conceivable angle. The printer spat out page after page of desperate analysis loop after loop:
- "The Great Gatsby as a Metaphor for Temporal Displacement"
- "Green Lights and Time Loops: A Modern Reading of Fitzgerald's Mechanics"
- "Nick Carraway: Unreliable Narrator or Time Lord?"
- "Gatsby's Parties: Recursive Events and Circular Time"
- "The Eyes of T.J. Eckleburg: Divine Watchmaker or Temporal Guardian?"
Reset.
During one particularly desperate loop, he attempted to recreate Gatsby's mansion layout in his dorm room using cardboard boxes and string. Reid returned from tennis practice to find Lance hosting an imaginary party with stuffed animals as guests, the room transformed into a cardboard Jazz Age nightmare.
"Old sport!" Lance greeted him, wearing a makeshift paper suit fashioned from printer paper and staples. "Care to dance? The orchestra's about to play Vladimir's latest composition!" He gestured to a teddy bear wearing a bowtie made from a paperclip.
Reid slowly backed out of the room, tennis racket raised like a shield, his eyes wide with a mix of amusement and concern.
Reset.
He began seeing green lights everywhere, their emerald glow haunting his waking moments. Exit signs in hallways mocked him with their vintage shine. Traffic signals became omens of temporal displacement. Even the power indicator on his laptop seemed to pulse with sinister meaning, its tiny light a beacon of eternal recurrence. The worst thing was the inconsistency in the loop durations, it could last minutes or hours. But it always reset.
"It's following me," he told Maya during loop sixty-something during a desperate phone call, his voice hoarse from hours of reading aloud. "The green light. It's everywhere. In traffic lights, store windows, dreams. I swear the vending machine's 'exact change' light winked at me."
"Lance," she said gently, placing a concerned hand on his shoulder, "maybe you should talk to someone? The counseling center has really good—"
Reset.
He tried more reading positions with scientific precision:
- Sitting normally (reset)
- Standing perfectly still (reset)
- Lying prone on the library floor (reset after a stern warning from the librarian)
- Doing a handstand against the wall (reset after a bruised forehead)
- Suspended upside down from his bed like a literary bat (reset after a bloody nose)
- Floating in the campus pool while holding the book above water (reset after a ruined library book)
Nothing changed the outcome.
During one loop, he attempted to mathematically map the novel's events onto his own timeline, covering an entire whiteboard with equations that would have made his physics professor weep:
If Gatsby waited 5 years for Daisy
And Nick narrates from 2 years later
Then the temporal coefficient of green light equals...
Factor in the rotation of Earth around the party lights...
Divide by the number of shirts Gatsby throws...
Reset.
He began dressing like the characters, hoping to trigger some revelation through method acting. The local thrift store provided most of his Jazz Age wardrobe, though finding a proper pink suit proved challenging in a college town. Reid walked in on him practicing Gatsby's "old sport" accent in the mirror while wearing a boater hat, suspenders, and what appeared to be his grandmother's pearls.
"I don't even want to know," Reid sighed, closing the door firmly.
Reset.
Lance started seeing temporal metaphors in every line, each phrase taking on new significance:
"And so we press forward, vessels straining against the tide, forever drawn back into memory's embrace..."
"When autumn's first chill whispers through the air, life seems to unfurl anew..."
"It's like Fitzgerald knew," he told an increasingly worried Emma on video call during loop forty, pacing his room while clutching a first edition he'd convinced the library to let him examine. "He was writing about time loops! He must have experienced this too! Why else would he be so obsessed with the past repeating?"
"Lance, you're scaring me," she said, her voice crackling through the phone's speaker. "Maybe you should get some sleep?"
Reset.
He tried reading the book while:
- Eating only green foods (lime jello, spinach, green M&Ms)
- Playing authentic Jazz Age music on vinyl
- Burning sage in violation of dorm policies
- Standing under every green light he could find
- Wearing full 1920s clothing, including spats
- All of the above simultaneously while reciting the text backward
Reset.
Finally, somewhere past loop one hundred, Lance sat in the library's armchair, physically and mentally exhausted. The same afternoon sunlight warmed his shoulder through the Gothic windows. The same book lay open to the same page, its words unchanged despite his countless attempts to find new meaning. The same laptop user typed their endless paper. The same radiator hissed steadily. Each reset had brought him back to this moment, with no indication that external time had moved forward.
“During those formative years of youth and impressionability...”
He softly shut the book, exhaling slowly as motes of dust danced through the golden light. Perhaps there was no meaning to find. Perhaps sometimes loops just happened, like rain or sunlight or the steady tick of clock hands. Maybe Fitzgerald wasn't trying to tell him anything at all, and the universe simply had a literary sense of humor.
"Some loops," he murmured to the unchanging pages, "are just boats beating against the current, aren't they, old sport?"
Pressure built behind his eyes. Colors smeared like wet paint. Reality yanked backward.
“During those formative years of youth and impressionability...”
Lance exhaled, cracked open the book once more, and resumed reading. At least he had plenty of time on his hands to sort things out eventually. Old sport.