00:00:00
When the clock reads 00:00:00
It had started in 1931, the numbers. When they started fiddling with genetic code. Everyone wanted it. It was in the water supply, the switch. Latched onto the existing DNA sequence. First few million people grew their clocks over a period of a couple of years, and then kids were born with them.
Vampires couldn’t change their DNA. Anyone turned before 1931 didn’t have one. For the most part, they recognized the gift for what it was; the freedom to choose. The freedom to recognize that a heart was stirring and that it was a path worth following, wherever it ended. Damon had chosen Katherine, Stefan had chosen Katherine, and he’d often mused that a clock might have told them which brother she was really destined for; or that it might have said she loved neither.
Damon had scoffed at that. A dozen times. But he wanted to see the clock, always, asked Alaric a thousand questions about the day when it was due to stop. What would he do, where would he go, helpful suggestions which were anything but helpful. Go to a strip club, Ric! You want a woman who knows how to take her clothes off slowly. Shit. Alaric had actually considered staking Damon in the thigh, a couple of times, over his helpful suggestions.
--
And then his clock started to go haywire.
Each time he died, the numbers shifted and changed until no one wanted to ask, anymore. No one wanted to know. Alaric had given up too much; would he have to give this up to?
“You might just meet someone you love,” Elena said, one day, when Alaric’s clock was reading a series of gibberish lines. Not even numbers. He smiled.
“You never know.”
--
After he came back from the dead that ninth time, it was… the green lights were nothing but smudges and blurs. Still, he was alive. He didn’t need anything else. Until the morning he woke up and the numbers were back.
14 hours, 32 minutes, 17 seconds.
Clear as day.
He had a drink with Damon. “What do you think it means?”
Damon shrugged, perturbed. “I should know? Whole thing’s stupid.” He was jealous. He wanted numbers to shake in Elena’s face, to ease away her doubts.
Alaric gave up and went home and tried not to think about it.
One hour, twelve minutes, fifty-two seconds.
He thought about leaving.
Forty minutes, no seconds.
He turned on the television.
Three minutes.
A knock on the door.
How was it he’d never met Katherine? But he hadn’t. Klaus had met her in his body, that was all. And she didn’t look like Elena, not really. She was all hips and boobs and eyelashes. Beautiful. Confusing. And apparently, Alaric’s.
“Katherine,” he said, with a sigh, wondering how the hell he was supposed to explain this to Damon ad Stefan. “You’d better come in.”
