Title: Tick

Rating: Teenish

Author's Note with Disclaimer: Despite my long time gone when I could've been raising money to buy Wicked I did not, and still do not own anything to do with Wicked except several songs and some books. Fancy that. I have, in fact, been gone due to lots of sad and boring things, and I will not suffer you through them. So, here is a bit of afternoon crazy Boq drabble. Enjoy and review as always. Also, seven pages of Bessa? Damn, Wicked fandome. Someone has been busy while I've been away.

Tick

It was a dull, hollow ticking that was haunting his every step. Tick. The sound, a random staccato pulling him into the darkness, echoed during the silent hours of the night. Tick. Boq knew that the heart itself was a mere clock, and Boq knew that, like many of the clocks scattered about Oz, the watch would one day slow and die. Tick. He was still quite human when he thought about it like that. However, he didn't want to think about it at all, and so on the days when the ticking resonated back and forth where his heart should be Boq took an axe to the trees of the forest. Tick. Sometimes the ticking remained there at the back of his mind, but mostly the hacking of the axe through the wood was the only thing he heard. Tick.

He was a creature of metal though, so he gave the pieces of splintered wood to the old man down the way who let him borrow an oil can. It was not a matter of kindness. Boq had no sense of that now with his fake heart and cold tin flesh that wasn't flesh at all. Tick. He wasn't sure if he'd ever been kind. That was something that this eternal death had given him—an unspoiled mind that looked back on his life with no anger, no sadness, no joy, and no regret. It wasn't really his life anymore, was it? It was some distant and dead man's life. Tick. Perhaps he had enjoyed his lies and loves, and perhaps he had hated his lies and loves. Looking back it was all so silly and inconsequential. The truth would've served him well. That man well. Him well. Was it him? He remembered it all, but he remembered it through someone else's eyes. He saw what had been him, and he saw what had been her. It was not through his eyes. Tick. Not him anymore.

Maybe he was insane. Surely this was insanity—dying, rebirth, running, chopping wood. It seemed a bit odd to him. Funny, sometimes, that he found his humanity in the oddest places. Perhaps that bespectacled boy before had truly been him. He must have been a silly man then. That woman had loved him. Oh, she had been crippled and crazy, but it was love. Even a metal made monster could infer that. There weren't many things that made people go crazy like that. Maybe his insanity was a result of love. Tick. Or not. There were a number of other things that could've driven him into the woods. Surely those bits and pieces of his memory that were blank contained some secret to this metal and this madness. Sometimes he heard a voice calling his name, but that was before the girl came stumbling down the road with a scarecrow. The voice didn't call for him anymore. There were no more rushed footsteps or crunching branches behind him. No, that voice had vanished the night before the girl had come walking his way with a blessed bit of oil in her hands. Sometimes, after the voice that haunted him with his own name had faded into the night, he walked where the voice had walked and looked down at the bloody footprints in the grass and dirt. It was someone wearing heals. Bloody red heals covered in dirt and tears by the sound of her voice. Why did he run from her voice screaming his name? Tick. What was his name? Maybe she would come screaming and he would remember.

He didn't hear it as much now. He hadn't heard it before the girl, but as soon as she'd taken him to the green it had started. Things were fuzzier now. All of the memories were a bit blurry around the edges. Was he metal or flesh first, and what was this ticking sound? Every other day it seemed like this ticking haunted him. But there was a rosebush near this tree so he didn't hack it away with the others. A rose's thorns couldn't tear through his metal skin. They just clung to the nooks of his tin and climbed up is unmoving body. It was so quiet. There was a rosebush at his toes. It was so silent. The bush was covering his feet and growing up his legs. Wasn't it supposed to be ticking? A bit of stem was curled around his shoulder. Ticking? What was supposed to be ticking? A thorn was at his throat. But that was silly because there had never been any sound. A rose was blossoming..ti..at his lips…ck…

Oh, roses were lovely.

-END-