Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
That was all she ever heard now.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The sound was loud, but she had learned to tune it out. Where it once drove through her skull like a drill, there was now only a faint headache.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
It was annoying, but she never complained. The clock and she were one and the same now. She was the clock, and the clock was her.
She had forgotten when this had started, forgotten when her time had become visible to her eye. Just one eye, with which she could peer into her own timeline, while the other saw the world around her. Outer vision and inner vision, space and time. Her own personal yin and yang.
She smiled, a wide, insane grin, that which had become her signature. The grin wasn't malicious, in fact, she produced it for the opposite reason.
She wanted to drive away people.
Since as long as she could remember, she was forced to see into her own timeline. She was forced to see when it began, when everything would happen, and worst of all, when it would cut short, leaving nothing but void afterwards.
She had found through an accident that she could stop her timeline from advancing further, by stealing Time from others. It was a horrible process, and she had promised herself that she would never use it.
But over time, she found herself growing more and more afraid the closer she got to the end. Eventually, she found herself passing the breaking point.
She went hunting.
She stole another's Time, all of it, ingesting it as if it was a delicacy, which it sort of was. Even as she watched her Time fly backward, resetting itself back years, even as she felt the wave of euphoria wash over her existence, she realized.
She could never go back now.
She had passed the point of no return now. She needed to keep feeling that euphoria, and now, she no longer cared what she had to do to get it.
Steal Time? Big deal.
Kill a few people? Sure, why not. As long as it gave her that feeling, as long as it let her watch her personal Time move backwards.
The grin came in full force, spreading across her face before she even knew it. But even as it did so, somewhere, in some small corner of her mind, she still had her senses.
She knew it was wrong. She knew she had broken her promise to herself. She had taken a life and absorbed it. She was planning to do it again.
"Tick-tock." she said quietly, deep in the recesses of her mind. "Tick-tock. Tick-tock."