A/N: Requested by dinsdaledarby on Livejournal, drabble post 9/28/09.
Prompt: time
Disclaimer: I don't own the original work this is derived from. This work is complete, and its brevity is intentional.
Enjoy!
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flightless bird
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The clock on the sterile white wall ticks over, each second following the previous in unbroken tidy succession.
Donna Noble, best temp in Chiswick, watches it with annoyed concentration. There's something about it that bugs her, see, though damned if she can figure out just what it is. It's a clock, obviously. An ugly clock, yes, but just a clock, doing what clocks are supposed to do-- measure time, and precisely. One, two, tick, tock, over and over again, without hesitation or variation.
"Will you shut up?" she snaps at it.
It doesn't, of course. It's a clock. It has time to measure.
There's a nagging feeling at the bottom of her head, right by her throat, that she knows well-- it's the same feeling she gets when trying to remember the assistant manager's last name, or when she's forgotten a friend's birthday, or when she's lost her keys and can't iquite/i remember where she put them. It the feeling of her mind laughing at her, holding the information she wants just out of reach. She wants to point her finger at the offending timepiece and tell it to stop doing it wrong, but it's inot/i wrong, except it is and she doesn't know how.
Why all the fuss? It's just a clock. Tick, tock, three, four.
"Right!" she says briskly, pushing the strange swelling feeling in her chest down and out of the way. "Work to be done. Where was I?"
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