It was sometime during January. Winter was at its coldest point, but as someone who hadn’t ever bothered buying pants or long sleeved shirts, Thomas came to school with his usual t-shirt, shorts and jacket. The three of them were baggy hand-me-downs from his family, so worn out that they looked even older than they were. Despite that, Thomas didn't wear anything else, be it summer or winter.

That day was no different; and it was an especially colder day, even for his town’s relatively harsh winter temperatures.

***

Thomas released Clara, loosening his tight grasp from her collar and letting her slide onto the floor. Once she had safely landed, Clara started incessantly coughing. Seeing this, Thomas finally snapped out of it and realised what he’d done, his face going pale.

“Are you ok?” He asked, panicking slightly.

“Yeah, this much is normal” She answered between coughs “And it isn’t even close to what we’re about to get”

Thomas looked away a little sadly. Then, for a few minutes, even after Clara had stopped coughing, the two of them stood like that, as though wondering what to tell each other.

“What do you know about the situation we’re in?” Slowly asked Thomas, as though each word was stuck in his throat.

“Nothing” Answered Clara “How about you?”

“Nothing too” he sighed “And what are you thinking about doing about this?”

Clara stared at him disdainfully, “I can’t even think straight”

“Well… I guess” Thomas mumbled, realising he’d somehow hit a sore spot.

“I think that for now, the best thing we can do is think about what these bracelets are…” Clara trailed off in a murmur.

Thomas looked at her confused. “Bracelets?”, he mused, attentively looking at her. Then, she rolled up her sleeve to reveal a pink bracelet - futuristic, with visible circuit traces and even dim lights in it - which seemed far too clunky (not to mention unfashionable) to bring to school.

Seeing it, Thomas found it weird, but he guessed that everyone's tastes were different while scratching his nose. It was then that he looked at his own wrist and realised… He also had one.

“You only realised it now?” Asked Clara, noticing the surprise on his face.

“Well, yes…” He gasped “What the hell even is this?!”

“I don’t know” she answered “But I would assume that it is related to our situation somehow”

Thomas stared at his own bracelet in shock. He tried to take it off his wrist, but it was tightly shut, with no opening mechanism in sight. As he continued to closely inspect the bracelet, the whole unfamiliarity from the situation started making him indescribably anxious, and in turn the panic he felt started growing more and more.

Only a few seconds had passed since he had noticed he had the bracelet, but he already couldn’t take it anymore. Ignoring Clara, he started desperately trying to get it off his wrist; and after reaching the conclusion that the only way to do that would be by breaking it, he brought his arm down wrist-first against the sink, in an attempt to break it.

Next thing he remembered…

***

Thomas woke up in the classroom again. He looked at the clock - 8:45, again - but this time there was no commotion, no abnormality, and no explosion. He had just woken up normally from his sleep in the classroom - so normally, in fact, that he started wondering whether all that had happened had been all a dream again. It is often impossible to distinguish reality from dream, after all.

However, before he could even feel relief, Clara raised her hand.

“Teacher, I just received a message, and there’s an emergency. Can Thomas and I leave the class?”

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Although the teacher had no idea what said emergency could even be, it was very much possible to read from Clara’s expression that whatever it was, it was not something she wanted to say out loud. The teacher trusted Clara, at least enough to know that she wouldn’t lie about this kind of thing; so even though her bringing Thomas with her felt a little strange, she decided to let them go without a question.

“Yes, you can,” The teacher answered, signalling to the door.

With that, Clara hurriedly left the classroom, and Thomas eventually followed suit. Clara brought Thomas to a relatively hidden place in the school grounds, and resumed the conversation they were having in the bathroom there.

“What the hell were you thinking, breaking this weird fragile-looking alien-like bracelet before doing anything else?!” She nearly screamed at him “I am here too! I might have even known something about them! What breaking them made something bad happen? You need to tell me before doing something like that!”

“...Yes” Thomas cowered before her fervour “I’m sorry”

The moment she received her answer, she instantly continued talking.

“But in any case, I guess it did serve a purpose. So apparently, one of these causes both of us to return to that time, huh?” She sighed, her eyes mellowing with relief “That’s great, really…”

Thomas understood where she was coming from. If breaking the bracelets caused them to return to go back in time without needing to feel whatever caused that pain, strong enough to make them lose their minds, then feeling relieved was only natural; the outcome they most feared was now preventable with a relatively easy action.

As he thought that, Thomas realised that he didn’t actually know what happened before they went back in time.

“By the way, I think I was asleep every time I died?” He was still not very comfortable with the idea of dying. All he could remember was the pain, so he ended up unintentionally finishing his sentence in an interrogative tone “So I didn’t really see what happened before we went back in time. Can you explain it?”

Clara looked at him with a grave expression.

“An explosion. Everything explodes. I am not sure what exploded, nor am I sure about how big the explosion was, but I am pretty sure it was an explosion”

Thomas brought his hand to his chin.

“...If it is an explosion, isn’t there a chance that we can run away from it?”

But Clara shook her head in response.

“I tried that after the first time. Ran as far as I could, but I died the exact same way”

Once again, Thomas spent some time thinking about what Clara had just said. The situation was already completely outside common sense, but as far as he knew, most explosions were relatively small. An explosion could ravage a school, yes, but an explosion big enough to instantly kill anything from a distance as large as a person could run seemed rather insane. Well, assuming the hypocentre was in the school, he mused. She could have unintentionally ran towards the explosion for all they knew.

But even if that were the case, the blast radius still had to be mind-blowingly big. Had an atomic bomb been dropped on top of them?

“...I think we should try to figure out more” He hummed, “You can’t cover that much distance by running. We can always call a taxi or something to get as far from the school as possible and see if we can at least fi-”

But Clara’s gaze interrupted his line of thought. His face contorted; he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“No. I don’t want to die anymore” she mumbled, averting her eyes “Even if there’s a chance we leave this loop or whatever, there’s also the chance that we don’t and we die again. I don’t want to risk it”

The first time Thomas had died, he had been well asleep and had only felt the pain for a split second. The second time, however, he had felt much more pain, indescribably so, but it is still a fact that he was asleep. Most likely, he concluded, being asleep numbed the pain somehow.

By contrast, he assumed that Clara had been fully awake the two times, likely having felt much, much more pain than the already unbearable amount he had experienced up until now. Thus, it was absolutely natural for her to want to avert it.

In all honesty, he also wanted to run away. He still wanted all of this to be a dream, some kind of strange creation from his own mind. He wanted to finally wake up, everything to return to normal, and to move on with his life uneventfully.

Yes, he “wanted”, but he knew that this was real. At some point, he had managed to convince himself so.

And it was exactly because of that that he felt like the correct course of action would be to ignore the pain, die as an experiment, and to try everything they could until they either ran out of ideas or finally left the loop. If they did nothing, it was likely that nothing would happen. Who knows how long they would last? But if they continued trying, maybe…!

Thomas lowered his head. He wanted to say it out loud, but he himself was not that fond of what his own idea entailed either, and when he looked at Clara’s leaden expression, he couldn’t help but stay silent. He looked at the bracelet in his wrist, his expression conflicted, and ended up saying nothing.

Because, maybe, in one of the loops, something different would happen. They were only in their third loop right? That’s a very small number. Maybe when they reached their sixth, tenth or even twentieth the explosion would stop happening, or maybe someone would magically appear to save them.

Maybe, he thought, passively waiting for something to change was the best course of action.