FM September Prompt II
Time is a fixed construct. Seconds tick into minutes tick into hours tick into days tick into weeks. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries. ...Millenniums. Time keeps track. A record of the last time you ate a meal, watched a show. When that rhythmic lub dup of your heart pumped out a fresh stream of blood.
All I have is time, tiny intervals of measurement ticking away, one by one, the rest of somebody's life. The clock's hand clicks. Ha ha ha, you're one second closer to death. Click. Anyone of these and your bucket could kick. Click.
It's soothing, in a way. In a life of such chaos and misfortune, the mayhem that comes with living in New York, something is fixed. Something is keeping order, even when the subway is seventeen seconds late. Something is keeping order, even when you have to get to work eight minutes ago. When a body is found, mutilated and slashed, scalps cut into, brain missing, that biological clock stopped forever. Something is keeping order.
There is no time here.
There's glass. There's food, two meager servings shoved into a drawer, depending on what I've let fly out of my mouth that day. And there's dark. So much that it hurts to even look down to this t-shirt, stark white and plain. There's a man whose eyes twitch in anger whenever the topic of his daughter comes up, the pretty girl who should have just put the gun in the slot. The meals that didn't come for days after she'd blown her brains all over the walls of the cell, not that eating was anything of an option, at that point, how many drugs they'd shoved into IVs.
But no time.
Guy could go a little crazy, in a monster hospital like that, all stone and glass and laughings and lashings but no steady, timed structure to tick away the seconds and make sure the seconds actually pass by in that cell. Time stood still. I'd been bad, bad, bad, frozen in time until I'd learned from my mistakes.
Thou shalt not kill.
Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.
...Let them strap me to a fucking table, see if something starts to finally sink in.
Prompt: Monster Hospital, by Metric
Muse: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray
Fandom: Heroes