He felt her hands at his throat. They rough, worn, callused, and yet at the same time gentle. As the darkness gathered around him shadows filled his vision and tears filled his eyes the years stuck in time flashed before him. A cascade of memories of a younger boy who would eventually become a dying man.

Alexander was his name, his friends and teammates nicknamed him 'the Great' out his obsession with history and his Greek heritage. He was on his way to a lacrosse tournament, the bus speeding along through the country side when the temporal anomaly hit him in the same way that a run away sentence hits an abrupt stop. Everything had frozen in time, except for him and the momentum he carried. The bruises caused by him going flying over the cheap plastic bus seats were something awful.

Pain gave way to fear, and fear to dread, and dread to horror as hours passed while he attempted to rouse his friends and teammates from their stasis. Even the coach and driver were unresponsive. The chill of the night was seeping into the bus, and with tears in his eyes he had curled into a ball and cried himself to sleep.

The morning came, which was odd in hindsight, but he didn't question it with the dawn came renewed vigor and his father hadn't raised a complacent child. After scavenging the bus for what food and water he could find he set out, following the road signs to the nearest town.

Relief had washed over as he wandered into 'Aloe Springs' and saw the most comforting sight he had ever seen. A girl roughly his age, running towards him. Relief turned to dread as she ran with tears in her eyes.

She embraced him and in a single, rushed breath said the words he had hoped she would be able to help with. "Please! You have to help me! No one is moving, they're all just stuck!"

Alex attempted to calm her, placing his hands on her returning the embrace. "I'm not sure what's going on, you're the only person who's still moving that I've seen. Name's Alex, what's yours?"

"Nicole, but my friends call me Nikki."

"My friends call me The Great" Alex laughed with a grin a slight wink.

It was the start of their journey together, a cheesy one, but a start.

Two years had passed, just the two of them, walking to increasingly more populated cities in the hopes of encountering someone. Anyone. But to no avail; they'd both been in their freshman year of high school when it started and their time together had made them grow closer.

Alex had gotten a spark in his eyes after going through the attraction flyers in the lobby at The Royal Suite in Washington D.C.; he'd initially set out to surprise her with a list of sites to see. She was adamant about taking advantage of their trip and was driven to see everything there was to see while she still could. The Library of Congress, one of the largest in the world, books galore and maybe some answers and at the very least some entertainment. They'd learned a lot in their year, utilities, A/C, and most electronics had stopped working, but a comfy bed was always a comfy bed. Last night was the first time they'd shared one. He thought he was pretty good, and as the last man on Earth he supposed it didn't make that big of a difference.

He went back to their room and gingerly slipped back into bed. She still woke. She still kissed him after waking her up. They were each other's world.

It'd been a few months of frantic research, learning what call cards were and how to use them. But time was running short, he could see the concern on her face and she could see the worry on his. They only had a few months to figure out how to restore the flow of time but everything had tried, everything he read was a dead end. Another day wasted, so precious few left. Alex laid his head down on the reading table they'd set up in the in library.

"Perhaps you should take a break, spend some time with me, practice for the future?" Her brilliant smile cast away the clouds that had been building in his mind. They retired to their makeshift sleeping area, mattresses and pillows piled in a study room in the library. They laid next to each other and he read aloud for the two of them, and the one on its way.

It was a fairy tail of sorts, a bit darker than he'd have picked but they all seemed to be enjoying it. A pair of children stuck realizing that time is a flat circle, and that only by one of them sacrificing themselves could the loop be broken. It was fate is his mind, this story closely mirrored their own, research of the author confirmed it in his mind. Time was indeed a flat circle. This had happened before, was happening now, and would most likely happen again.

He spent a week preparing things, explaining how to do it, what to avoid doing and why they were doing it that way and why they were doing it there.

His eyes closed, life leaving his body. Nothing but darkness remained.

And then pain. Noise. So much noise. His chest hurt. The light was blinding.