Once they decided to leave things as they were, for them, it felt as though time started moving again. One loop quickly turned into two, and two into three; the number of loops continued rising with seemingly no bound.

In every iteration, the same would happen: they would leave the classroom under the pretext of an emergency so as to rouse the minimum amount of suspicion possible, thus avoiding getting into some kind of hasslesome situation, do whatever they wanted for a little less than one hour, break one of the bracelets, and rinse and repeat.

Most of the time, this “do whatever they want” phase entailed simply staying on their phones, sometimes for entertainment, sometimes for researching their current situation. One would think that they’d focus on the latter, but researching such an unscientific phenomena was extremely hard.

The internet is riddled with fiction and straight up hallucinations presented as facts, and taking into account that they knew next to nothing about their own situation, attempting to dig any useful information was extremely frustrating, if not straight up impossible.

However, even without researching for it, it didn't take long before they had a knotty realisation. Specifically, they found out that they still needed both food and sleep, for an unknown reason.

This was, to say the least, extremely strange. Usually, the conclusion would be that they and their bodies were coming back to the past whenever a bracelet was broken; it would explain why they retained their memories, sleepiness and appetite.

But Clara was absolutely certain that she had died when hit by the explosion, and even if she hadn’t, there had to be some kind of burn.

Of course, neither of them showed any signs of that. In fact, neither of their appearances were any different from the ones they had before the loops, which made it even odder.

To make absolutely sure this wasn’t happening, Thomas cut most of his hair out with a knife, only to see that in the next loop, his hair was back to normal. In the end, they didn’t manage to find anything. The more they tried to research their situation, the stranger it got.

In their 10th loop, Thomas, who hadn’t slept much to begin with, started getting too sleepy to even function, so they gave up on doing anything. Instead, Clara was to stay awake while he slept so she could break the bracelet when the hour they had neared its end, and once Thomas had slept his fill he’d do the same for Clara.

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6 hours of Thomas sleeping later, Clara, too, was starting to get sleepy, so since Thomas didn’t sleep much to begin with, they decided to swap positions.

However, it didn’t take long for a new problem to arise…

***

“Whenever you return, you suddenly get fully awake?” Asked Thomas, handing Clara some kind of cafeteria bread as he munched on his own.

“Yes…” Sighed Clara, her voice trembling “I can sleep well for one hour, but after that, I get so awake that I cannot go back to sleep…”

“Hmm…” Thomas had already been thinking about solutions for quite a while, but he couldn’t find one.

The reason why this happened had already been deduced by the two: Originally, at 8:45, Thomas had been asleep, while Clara had been awake. And because of that, whenever they returned, Clara woke up quite hard. Conversely, if Thomas was awake before returning he’d wake up, but if he was asleep he’d continue to sleep. It was that simple.

Taking into account the time it took her to fall asleep, and the fact that if she did so in the class she’d be called out (the class was, after all, already used to ignoring Thomas), she’d only have 45 minutes of sleep at best, and doing that for so long was starting impact her cognitive skills.

Clara could already barely keep her eyes open most of the time, and at this point, the best she could do was have Thomas bring her something to eat and see if that helped somehow. It might not have looked like it, but this was also Thomas’ problem; if he ever needed to sleep, since Clara couldn’t break her bracelet for him, he’d have to either set an alarm on his phone so he’d wake up just before the explosion happened and suffer the same way, either be awoken by the explosion automatically.

Although the option he’d choose is pretty obvious, it doesn’t make it any better.

To make matters worse, there was another issue: One could die from lack of sleep. Were that to happen, neither of them knew what consequences that would cause. At worst, going back in time wouldn't save her.

“Hmmm…” Once again, Thomas drifted into thought. However, taking into account the unfamiliarity of the situation, he simply couldn’t find a solution.

Were they to do nothing, their strength would be slowly sapped away. After seeing Clara like that, Thomas knew that he had to do something. But he was out of ideas.

All he could do was take care of her to the best of his abilities, until he came up with something that’d stop this.

“How fucking frustrating” he murmured, gritting his teeth as he glared at the sleepy Clara who slowly ate the bread he’d given her “Don’t you fucking dare leave me alone in this shit”

Little did he know, that moment would be his last one with her while she was still conscious.