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“Not good, not good at all…” The Warden muttered to herself as she sat on her throne. Normally she loathed being in this room of her clock tower, the ticking was always the loudest here, but it was for a good reason this time.
She had been doing her usual brief overlook of the next few weeks events, a check she started making when they found themselves dealing with world-ending calamities more frequently than usual. It always helped to know if something bad was going to happen…
Seems that something really bad was about to happen. Hinged off some minute detail she couldn’t find. If she wanted to prevent this, she’d probably have to manually go through each variation of the timeline…
There comes the reason she’s in the throne room of her tower. Her powers were strongest here, in the heart of it all, it made peering through timelines much faster and easier. She sighed at the sound of the clock, a sound that both irked and empowered her. Time was complicated like that…
Normally she’d alert the others, but considering she hadn’t found the cause yet, she’s sure that they couldn’t help her. This was something only she could do, after all.
So she took a deep breath, closed her eyes… And got to work.
The first thread she traced back led to nothing. Just a sudden playing out of catastrophic events, of… Of images of entire cities leveled, streets running with blood. Death and carnage everywhere.
She shook her head and went to the next. This one was different. She saw… Well, she saw Holox of all people trying to fix it. Pink fur stained red, a broken sword, horns snapped clean off, and only two left alive… Why did they even try? Why weren’t the rest of them there?
Note to self, keep them away from this.
Next she saw a combination of Myth sans Ina alongside Holoh3roes. Fiery anguish at the sight of a familiar raincoat soaked with blood, red eyes burning with rage at the loss, silver eyes almost glowing with malice as they were cornered…
Okay. Keep them away from this too.
Just Myth. No Ina. The immortals being struck away, leaving a gravely injured Atlantian and sobbing detective.
Her brow furrowed. Where is Ina?
Another thread from the same cloth, trying to figure out where the priestess was… Nothing. She couldn’t find her. Weird…
It went on like this for an hour. Slowly going one by one to try and determine what caused it, or at the very least find a timeline where it ended well, that would be far more telling…
As time went on, she got more desperate. She flickered from thread to thread, frantically looking for a string that didn’t end in blood.
Nothing.
No answers.
But one thing she did notice is that Ina was absent from every single one of them. There was always a gap between whoever it was coming to save the day and the bloodied aftermath, like something was blocking it from her vision. Gods perhaps?
Her head hurt.
She kept going.
Another slaughter.
She kept going.
Visions of her holding her owl in her arms, watching the life fade from her eyes.
She kept going.
Her head hurt.
After what felt like days, she finally found a timeline that was clear. Inky black hands emerging from the sky, pillars of light… And Ina. No, not Ina, a God inside her body that was doing all of this. Her book was gone, it couldn’t be the Ancient Ones. So who…?
A sharp stab of pain behind her eyes. She propped her head up on one of her hands, gritting her teeth and nearly cutting her lips on the fangs. She couldn’t stop now, she had to keep going.
She kept at it. Plucking through every offshoot of that timeline, desperately searching for answers that she was so sure were just out of reach-
The sound of something dripping pulled her out from it and into full awareness of just how far she had gone and how little she had been breathing. It was a single drop of her blood dripping from her bitten lip, the lightly glowing flow of time that pulsed through her veins.
In some corner of her mind, she knew it had been days. The ache in her bones and sharp pain in her stomach was evidence enough, but…
Her head hurt. Badly. It felt like her skull was splitting open at the seams, staring blearily into nothing, breathing almost nonexistent. Outside… She needed to… Air… Air…
The Warden tried to stumble to her feet and out of her throne, clutching her head in her hands. Uneasy and stuttering clicking of heels came in beat with each tick of the clock. Loud. LOUD.
“G-Goddamnit…” Kronii whimpered, clawing at her ears as each tick sent another stab of sharp pain through her entire being. It was too much. The timelines, the sound, the pain, the headache, the- The- …
The Warden barely caught herself against the wall, stumbling. She grit her teeth, trying to struggle her way through the hall, using the wall as support. She felt cold. Too cold. She needed- She needed to get out of her tower- Home. She needed to go home.
But… But they’d see. They’d see her like this.
No.
No they won’t.
I won’t let them.
Next… What next…? No… Not home… Throne is… Far…
The pain was getting worse. Her thoughts were fragmenting, scattering into nothing the second they had them, like her head really had been split open and they were falling out. She couldn’t grasp a single one as they evaded her, reaching out to catch them but they just slipped through her fingers, falling to the ground and shattering down to nothing but fractals of a memory.
“...Hurts…” She whimpered as she stumbled, just barely keeping upright. Timeline… Timeless…. All in her head, thousands upon thousands of possibilities of the future running through her mind, too much information in her brain, too many bloodied ends, too much noise, too much too much too m-
She barely even noticed when she fell to the ground. The sting of hitting the hard marble floor was muted, far away.
She tried to get up.
She couldn’t move.
She tried to roll off her stomach.
She couldn’t move.
She tried to grip onto her head.
She. Couldn’t. Move.
Why couldn’t she move.
She couldn’t speak. Her tongue felt like lead. She could barely even look around. The pain just mounted and mounted, and, to her horror, blood started dripping from her nose. She had overdone it. She had really overdone it and was paying the consequences with interest.
Her vision was fading. The pain was getting worse and worse by the second, it was a wonder that she wasn’t blacking out. Even as her vision faded, she knew she was awake. She could still hear the clock, the stupid stupid clock, ticking away without a care in the world.
Time was cruel like that.
“Kroniiiiiiiiiii, I got a new case and I was hoping you could help a girl out?” A voice called out, echoing the tower.
No response.
“Uhhh… You good? I know you’re here, if you don’t wanna help you can just say so!” The detective huffed as she walked further into the tower. There was no response again, but the ticking was sign enough that the Warden was here. The tower only awoke at the presence of it’s master, after all.
“Oi, this isn’t funny Kronii, I don’t think I have to tell you this since you are time, but you’ve been here for like, a week?” Amelia kept walking, cringing at how eerie the near-silence was. She wasn’t in the main entrance, not in her study, not even the room where the magic happened. That left only the throne room… Kronii didn’t like going into the throne room unless it was for serious world threatening ‘avengers assemble’ sort of reasons, the ticking was always too loud in there, she said. So what was she doing?
“Alrighty, ready or not, I’m here.” Amelia called out as she moved to open the doors, only to realize they were already cracked open. Not on official business then…
“...Kron-”
She saw a pair of familiar legs sticking out from the corner of her vision.
“Wha- KRONII?!” The detective rushed over, immediately moving to kneel down beside the far far too still body of the Warden, turning her onto her back. Her nose looked like it had been bleeding heavily, covering the bottom half of her face in the odd dull ichor that served as her immortal blood. The flow of time itself had been bleeding out of her, but… It wasn’t supposed to look this dull. Not by a long shot.
“K-Kronii? Can you hear me?!” Amelia pressed a finger to her pulse.
Nothing.
“...Fuck.” Amelia wheezed out, eyes frantic. She knew Time was immortal, but that didn’t mean her body was. Was she murdered? Did someone break in? God, it was hard to tell with her like this… Against any rational thought, she pulled out her watch, gently pressing it to the Warden’s chest.
Flashes of incredible pain. Blood. Dizziness. Double vision turning into no vision at all. Slight numbness. Loss of balance…
“...Oh Kronii…” Amelia whimpered as she pulled it away, close to her own chest, protective of the fragment of time she had to keep.
An aneurysm. Kronii had died of a brain aneurysm. Immortal bodies took longer to die from things like this. Amelia knew that for a human, it could be as long as 24 hours of suffering before… B-Before…
But the bodies of immortals were stronger. It took longer for them to die from things like wounds or in this case medical emergencies, she knew that it took a lot to put Kiara down for good after all…
So she’d been laying here. In pain. Dying all alone in this cold tower on this freezing floor with the sound of the clock going off at max volume right behind her head. For a week.
She should have come sooner.
With a heavy heart, she pulled out her phone and called the one person she could think of that probably wouldn’t panic and tell everyone immediately. A few heartbeats of ringing before the line picked up.
“Calliope Mori speaking.” Calli called out, seeming to be in the middle of something. She could hear what sounded like music in the background and the sound of Calli tapping a pencil to paper. Lyric writing maybe?
“Calli. It’s… I-It’s me.”
Another empty heartbeat.
The music stopped.
“Amelia? What happened? You- You sound-”
“Kronii’s dead.”
Silence.
“...What… What do you…?” “Her body is dead. I think she had a brain aneurysm. Do you… D-Do you know what to do to get her back?” Amelia interrupted, voice choked with unshed tears.
“...Okay. Okay it depends on how long she’s been dead, her old body needs to either decay or be destroyed for a new one to start forming. Her soul is safe and sound, but it’ll take time for it to get a new vessel.” Calli explained, voice heavy.
“So… S-So should I…? B…Bu…” “Burning it- Her- Is an option, yeah, but… Maybe you should take it up with the Council.” Damn Calli for being a voice of reason, she knew she should tell them, but…
“...I have a better idea.” Amelia glanced down at her watch, biting her lip. She wasn’t sure if it would go off the fritz in the middle of time’s domain, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t… Couldn’t bear telling the Council what had happened. Who knows what world-wide destruction would happen with the concepts of said world at an emotional low like that, not to mention how much it’d hurt her to deliver the news...
Yeah. She made up her mind.
“Thanks Calli.”
She hung up.
She turned the dial back six days. Far enough back she’d be alive, but not so far back that she’d have no idea why it happened.
She pressed the button.
A tingle of golden electricity burst from the watch, coating her body head to toe in bright light…
And then she was gone.
Gone, but in the same exact place she just was.
Kronii was still on the ground but she was breathing. The blood wasn’t nearly as bad, she must have been bleeding out for a while…
“...h…wh…nn..g….k?” The Warden struggled, voice weak and garbled. Amelia let out a sigh of relief at the sound of her voice, turning her onto her back again…
Alive, but not alert. She needed to act fast before the brain damage set in…
“Hey there Kronii. Hope you aren’t scared of needles.” Amelia remarked as she pulled a familiar syringe from a holster in her belt. A Watson concoction, usually only semi-safe for her, but she’s sure Kronii could take it.
“...wh…a…wh..y…” Is all she could get out before flinching slightly at the feeling of a needle in her arm.
“Sorry Kronii…” Amelia sighed as she injected it in. Hazy eyes fell closed, body tensing…
But the odd glowing concoction worked fast.
The Warden’s eyes snapped open, eyes tinged with pink from the concoction doing its thing and pupils narrowed to reptilian slits. Not a good sign, Kronii’s eyes only did that if she was pissed or generally running on a more of a is-literally-a-snake level which couldn’t be good… But ‘not good’ is better than dead, so Amelia would happily take that as a good sign.
“Hey uh… You alright? Not dying on me, are you?” Amelia asked slowly, cautiously. Kronii’s gaze shifted towards her, slits rounding to their usual shape a lot faster than Amelia had honestly been expecting. The pink ring faded just as quickly, seems immortals really were just built different, guess she was just lucky to have a laundry list of god awful side effects after taking the concoction herself…
“...Watson?” Kronii’s voice was stronger than before, but still pretty weak.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Amelia sighed in relief, carefully moving to try and help her sit up. Kronii was blinking hard, wiping her nose with a gloved hand.
“...What happened?” The Warden questioned, voice growing stronger with each passing moment.
“...Not gonna sugar coat it. You had a brain aneurysm. You died six days later. Thankfully your good old friendly neighborhood time traveling detective found out and went back to save you. You’re welcome by the way.” Amelia huffed.
“...I…Died?” Kronii’s voice broke a little at the thought. She was no stranger to dying, there had been times in the past where she died from overdoing it in her tower, coming to years later to the sight of her own decayed bones scattered on the floor, even more times where she died in a battle to protect the universe…
But it was anything but routine.
“Yeah. You did. …What did you do?”
Silence.
“...You tried to fix an anomaly by yourself again. Didn’t you?” Amelia sighed heavily at that, rubbing her temples.
No response.
“Kronii…” Amelia drawled out, emphasizing the disappointment in her voice. The Warden didn't make eye contact.
“...I thought… I thought it would be easy this time… I… I am Time, I should be capable of fixing it myself damnit!” Kronii hissed out, but there was no real bite or heat to it.
“Kronii, you might be a God, but you also aren’t invincible. Just because you can’t die for good doesn’t mean you should do stupid shit because of your goddamn pride!” Amelia hissed right back, though in a less literal sense than the Warden.
“Oh I’m sorry, did you want me to let everything come crashing down? Did you want me to let this become the worst timeline?!” Kronii struggled to get up on wobbly legs.
“Of course not you big baby, but that doesn’t mean you should get yourself killed from pushing yourself too hard. If not for you, what about the Council? Because if I hadn’t gone back to save your ass I would’ve had to tell them all that you got yourself killed. You want that?” Amelia stood up, holstering her syringe with a glare.
“Wh- No, but-” “There’s not ‘but’ you goddamn idiot! It’s yes or no! You can’t ‘no, but’ dying, Kronii!” Amelia’s glare grew harder, hands on her hips.
Silence.
“Good. Now, how about this, when you find something like that again, something with so many variables it literally makes your brain bleed, please call me up, alright? I might not be able to see timelines like you, but that just means I don’t go down a spiral that, again, leads to a literal actual brain aneurysm. Deal?” Amelia huffed, holding out her hand.
Kronii just stared at her.
“Deal?” Amelia repeated, sterner this time with a tone that left little room for argument.
“...Deal.”
The detective smiled.
A clock needs two hands to keep in harmony, leave the hour without the minute and you lose a fraction of what time it could be, leave the minute without the hour, and you’re completely lost.
Time ticks on.
And so do they.