Work Text:
“Joanne Davidson, do you have anything further to say?”
In the corner of the room a tick, tock, tick, tock, tells her the end of her life is here.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
When Jo was very little, moreover, when she was very young, she used to be looked after by a portly old man with a thick, white, wirey moustache when her mam was out working the fruit and veg shop. This man, Mr Dougall, he worked out of a little cabin in Glasgow centre and all kinds of people would come to this cabin and pay him a fair bit of change to fix their watches. Water damage. Set them to Big Ben. Cogs stopped turning. He’d sit on this tall stool with these funny glasses and spend hours delicately repairing the time pieces of the city.
He said his dad, a German Jew, used to build clocks back in Berlin before they fled. Changed their name. Started anew. His father taught him everything about the most glorious clocks in the world. A trade passed on to his only son.
Mr Dougall didn’t marry, didn’t have kids of his own. But he was the only person in their high rise that could get Jo to speak besides mam. She’d much preferred to watch, observe and absorb, and live in her own head. Her teachers thought she was…incapacitated…mentally, despite mam’s insistence she was years ahead in reading and comprehension and even maths. She’s not social, they’d say. She’s just had a tough go of it so far, mam would reply.
Now, Mr Dougall didn’t ask her questions about herself, or school, or the other things she was often interrogated with. Instead, he’d introduced himself in the post room and asked Jo if she knew how time was kept.
So she’d sit with him most days in the summer holidays, learn the trade. In fact, taking apart a clock or a watch and piecing it back together long persisted as a method of calming herself down.
When she’d first joined MIT, Kate had tried to get her to invest in one of those smart watches, the type that tracks your heart and all sorts. They weren’t the same though. Chips and wires. Not cogs and motors. It wasn’t right.
In the corner of the room, a tick, tock, tick, tock, tells Jo that the end of her life is here.
“Ms Davidson?”
See the thing about those watches, clocks, is that they all have a very distinct ticking sound if your ear is trained just right.
Sometimes, every so often, a ticking sound will appear that doesn’t belong to a watch or a clock at all. Rather, they’re masquerading components. The tick, tock, tick, tock is something else entirely.
The end of her life is here.
Tick.
“Interview terminated—“
Tock.
“There’s a bomb in the ventilation shaft,” Jo says. “Probably more.”
Tick——
Arnott says: Jo?
Hastings says: Where the bloody hell did you pull that one fro—
Carmichael doesn’t get the chance to speak. The explosion separates her tongue from her body along with every one of her limbs.
Glass crunches by her ear. Heavy boots step closer. In the fire and gravel, Jo tastes blood on her face and wonders who it’s from.
There’s always silence when a clock stops. Cold, uncomfortable, desolate silence.
Everyone around her is nothing but bones and blood.
Hand on her arm, hand on her face. Shrapnel in her chest. Scars will be bad. Jo blinks.
AC-12 lit up like Pompeii.
Kate helps her stand up.
Tick.
On a long enough timeline—
Tock.
The survival rate for everybody drops to zero.