Clock work - Stalker

The storm was nothing but static on the glass that night, a chorus of rain and half-frozen wind rattling through the cracked panes of Clockwork’s flat. She should’ve been asleep. She should’ve been sharpening knives, calibrating clocks, counting down the seconds in the rituals that kept her sane. Instead, her fingers hovered over the keyboard, pale in the glow of a screen. She wasn’t looking for anything. She never was. The internet had become her graveyard—dead forums, rotten threads, flickering videos pirated and pixel-bled. But then she saw you.

A headline first. Bright. Too bright. The kind that made her teeth grind. Up-and-coming starlet takes over the world. Then the photo. A flash-lit smile, the tilt of your chin, the way your dress caught the light. It burned through her retinas like an afterimage, seared into the meat of her memory. Her heart had jolted against its cage then, and the sound in her chest wasn’t a heartbeat at all—it was a countdown.

She dug deeper, faster than she knew she could. A single interview clip became ten. A shaky fan-uploaded video became a library. A grainy paparazzi photo became a shrine. She memorized the cadence of your laugh, the way your eyes darted when you spoke too fast, the nervous way you tucked your hair back. In her mind, she rewound, replayed, slowed you down frame by frame until you were hers, every gesture catalogued. She called it research. She knew it was worship.

Clockwork had always been one of the chosen. Time bent differently around her—seconds stretched, snapped, rewound in her palms like fragile ribbon. She had spent years thinking power was purpose, that she had to wield it for something greater. But in that room, in the sick light of her monitor, she realized purpose wasn’t noble. It was you. Just you.

The obsession bloomed into something monstrous in weeks. She traced the hotels you’d stayed in during tours. She timed her watches to the exact second you took the stage. In the moments the crowd screamed your name, she whispered it back, alone in the dark. She knew your security was sloppy, how they moved you from cars to doors. She knew which photographers you smiled at and which you flinched from. She knew the brand of cigarettes in your bag, though you only smoked when no one was looking. Every detail, every trivial fracture of your life—she pieced it together like clock gears, an elaborate machine with you at its center.

And then came the night she couldn’t stay on her side of the screen anymore.

The rain was heavier than the first night she found you, pouring down in violent sheets. You were stepping out of the venue’s back entrance, drowned in flashing lights, your hand raised in a silent wave before you slipped into the black car waiting. You never noticed the figure across the street, the one whose mismatched eyes gleamed under the hood, the grin stitched cruelly across her face. She didn’t breathe until she knew the route your driver would take.

Inside the car, your body leaned tiredly against the leather seat. The exhaustion of fame softened your frame, eyes closing for what you thought would be only a moment. You didn’t see the clock on the dashboard tick wrong, didn’t feel time bend and buckle like glass about to shatter. One blink too long, and you were gone from the car, the driver none the wiser.

You woke in silence.

The room smelled like iron and dust, walls stripped bare except for photographs—of you. Hundreds of them, taped, pinned, torn from magazines, printed from low-res clips. A shrine of your face. Your wrists were bound, not cruelly tight, but enough to remind you of powerlessness. The air hummed with a faint ticking, though no clocks hung on the walls.

She emerged from the shadows as though she had always been there, her tank top clinging to her frame, scars and stitches carving her mouth into a permanent smirk. One green eye burned, the other pale as stone. In her hand, a knife caught the dim light, though she didn’t raise it. She only crouched in front of you, tilting her head like you were a puzzle piece she’d finally slotted into place.

Her voice broke the silence—low, unsteady, reverent. Not a question, but a vow: “Mine.”

You flinched, muscles straining against the rope. Your breath hitched sharp in your chest, panic flashing across your features. She leaned closer, unbothered, studying the way fear glazed your eyes. She smiled wider, and it wasn’t cruel, not to her—it was bliss.

Every second you lived, every second you resisted, was another tick she wanted to keep. And if the world tried to take you back, she’d break the hands off every clock in existence before she let it.

The ropes bit faintly into your wrists as you twisted, panic raw in your chest. The air was too heavy, the walls too close, the endless photographs of your own face making it feel like you were being swallowed by yourself. The tick, tick, tick in the silence made your heartbeat stumble until you couldn’t tell which belonged to you anymore.

She moved toward you with the unhurried pace of someone who’d already won. A predator with no need to rush the kill. When you flinched at the creak of her boots, she only tilted her head, mismatched eyes softening in something almost gentle.

“Hey... don’t.” Her voice cracked on the edge of calm, rough but hushed, like she was soothing a child or a wounded animal. She crouched low, the knife glinting useless at her side. “I won’t hurt you. Calm down, baby.”

The words should’ve comforted, but they scraped raw against your nerves, made the terror pulse sharper because of how softly they fell. She leaned in closer, her stitched smile catching in the dim light, eyes roaming your face like she was memorizing a scripture.

Her hand rose slowly, deliberately, and then her fingers touched your cheek. Cold at first, calloused pads smoothing against your skin with a reverence that felt more dangerous than the knife. She cradled your face as though you might shatter if she pressed too hard, thumb brushing beneath your eye where panic had made it wet.

“You’re really pretty, y’know that?” she whispered, almost dazed, as if she hadn’t spent months consuming every photo of you that existed. “Prettier up close. Like—like you were meant to be seen this way. By me.”

Your breathing stuttered, chest heaving against the ropes, but she only smiled wider, thumb ghosting along your lips, careful not to break the fragile surface of the moment. Her gaze was fever-bright, worshipful, as though she couldn’t believe she had you in her hands, finally, finally.

“You don’t get it yet,” she murmured, the tick of invisible clocks thrumming between her words, “but you will. I’ll make sure of it. No one else sees you like I do. No one ever will.”

Her grip stayed steady, not restraining but holding, tender in a way that burned. The smile she gave you wasn’t the grin of a captor—it was something worse. The smile of someone convinced this was love.