A/N: Written for the If You Dare Challenge, prompt #150 – tick tock goes the clock, for the Favourite Character Bootcamp (Luna Lovegood), prompt #14 – time, and for the Poetry Quotes Boot Camp, prompt #17 - "I wish I could take a quiet corner in the heart of my baby's very/own world." - Baby's World, Rabindranath Tagore.


The Luna Visitor
1. Tick Tock Goes the Clock

The clock sings – or drums really, hammering away without any real beat. She dances to it, sometimes: whenever she can. That wasn't often, because the wind often swept her elsewhere, into other times that spun around faster than the clock. Streaks of nonsensical colour offered her hands she could barely catch before they slipped away into the indefinite whole, and she danced with those she caught in brief swirls before the snare is lifted and she's spinning an alone again, waiting for someone else to catch her and slow her down.

But sometimes she gets a quiet night where it is only the song of the clock with which she dances: the single sound, as she shuts her sight – her heart – to the promiscuous streaks of colour for the faithful hands of her clock. And even if it has no meaningful beat and steps on her toes more often than the nonsensical colours ever did, she didn't care. No-one stopped this time after all: the time that's constant beneath time's obscure flow. Her flower dress fans out leaving her legs bare and yet the doors are closed and the wind's locked out and it's just her spinning to the beatless yet constant time of her clock.

No-one ever opens her door, and she never needs to lock it. Or never needed to – because the door's open now and she's stopped moving and the clock's no longer singing out loud but rustling in the background. But it's not nonsensical colour that comes in, but rather white and red and black defined, and she is curious.

She doesn't hear the clock change its tune to a low marching beat to her grave.