Review-Clockwork: A Mind Wound Tight Epi

Time ran out. Now she returns—eye replaced, heart colder, justice winding.

Clockwork: A Mind Wound Tight

By Ticking Hourglass

--A Reimagining of Clockwork: Your Time Is Up

Epilogue

College was quieter than she expected.

Not in volume--there were still crowds, music, the buzz of conversations in every corner of the dining hall and quad. But Natalie moved through it like water slipping past glass. No one really saw her. No one asked where she was from, or why her left eye shimmered strangely beneath campus lights. She kept her schedule tight, her comments brief, and her green gaze forward.

She liked it that way.

She learned the rhythm of her schedule: lectures in the morning, quiet lunches on shaded benches, long evenings tucked between the stacks in the library. She kept her head down--but for the first time in a long time, she wasn't hiding.

Her professors called her precise. Her lab partner once said she always knew when to speak and when to say nothing. Like she was watching some internal clock. Natalie only smiled.

In truth, she was watching. Always. Not out of paranoia, but out of habit. She had spent years mapping danger, measuring silence, reading tension in a doorway before it opened.

No one whispered behind her back. Or if they did, it wasn't cruel. Just curious.

Her dorm room was small but neat. Her side of it anyway. Everything folded, labeled, measured. The desk lamp cast a steady light. The hum of her roommate's sleep playlist filtered through the wall.

And the pocket watch ticked gently in her coat--always close, always steady. Some nights, she took it out and held it in the dark.

Fig sat beside her on the bed, his worn stitching smoothed under her thumb. He had a new ribbon now--deep green, to match her eyes. With his old, scratched eye, he watched as she studied, or listened to music, or ran her thumb across the cold surface of the watch.

She would listen to it. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Time moved for everyone. But for Natalie, it moved differently. She counted it. Held it close. Kept it honest.

She never set out to find the worst in people. But somehow or other, it always managed to find its way to her.

Each beat was a footstep through time. A reminder:

You had time. They didn't.

She didn't plan anything--at least, not yet. Now she mapped people instead.

One evening, she stood on the balcony of the library, watching shadows stretch across the lawn below. Her coat sleeves tugged down over her wrists. The watch rested in her palm, quiet and warm.

A breeze passed.

The campus lights flickered for a moment. Or maybe that was just the reflection in her eye. She didn't move. Didn't speak. Only turned the watch over once in her hand and slipped it back into her pocket.

She had learned how to read time--especially the kind running out.

She took notes, but not on paper. She observed, but didn't confront. The clock turned when it needed to. That green gaze--sharp and unblinking--swept across dining halls, lecture rooms, study lounges. She memorized the ebb and flow of cruelty. The quiet exchanges that weren't as innocent as they seemed.

The campus was full of clocks. And she had learned how to listen to each one.

One dusk, as the sky bruised purple over the quad, Natalie sat beneath a tree with Fig in her lap. She watched students come and go--laughing, rushing, complaining about deadlines.

A girl sat nearby on the stairwell, crying quietly. Far across the green, her boyfriend laughed with his friends.

Natalie blinked. Slowly.

Then reached into her coat pocket and let her fingers close around the watch. Tick. Tick. Tick.

It didn't just tick in her hand. It hummed somewhere deeper--like a spinal murmur, a second rhythm beneath her breath. She didn't carry it because it told the time. She carried it because it told truth.

No list. No red yarn. No grand scheme for revenge.

She went to class. She studied. She answered texts when she felt like it. Sometimes she even smiled when someone smiled first.

But in the back of her mind, a different rhythm lived. She held a quiet belief:

Masks weren't a thing to distrust.

Masks were how people told you who they really were.

She wore one too. Not to deceive, but to endure. Hers was silence. Observation. Stillness.

Let others fill the air with noise. She preferred to listen.

Some people got away with things they shouldn't. Time moves forward--

But consequence always catches up. Eventually.

One night, walking across campus under the buzz of orange lights, she passed a guy shouting into his phone. He shoved past a girl in front of him, made her stumble. Didn't apologize.

Natalie turned her head slightly--just enough to glimpse his face. Just enough to remember.

She didn't break her stride.

But her fingers closed around the watch in her pocket.

And that was when the thought arrived--quiet, precise, like the edge of a second: Tick, tick...

Your time is up.

If someone were to try and pin down the pattern--link the expulsions, the accidents, the unexplained silences left behind people who once loomed large--maybe they'd find it, but by then, she'd already be watching.

She was no longer the girl from the broken house.

No longer the crying child behind the door.

No longer the betrayed girlfriend or the bullied loner. She had become something else.

The stillness before consequence. The rhythm behind retribution.

And whether they noticed or not-- Clockwork was already turning.