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“Why let him do it at all?”
Clockwork’s lair is a sprawling behemoth behind and above and below them. Tucker has been guided to its heart, and is nestled there now with Clockwork beside him, their blue-glow a kind of awe he doesn’t know how to take. There’s a whisper to the space around them: something that sings.
“He needs to learn.”
Before them, one of Clockwork’s great gear-screens shows Danny: in over his head in an alternate present that Clockwork had allowed him to create. What the gear shows is warped and inconsistent; Tucker can see the way it trembles, liable to collapse at the slightest touch. It is not a stable timeline. It is training wheels.
“There have to be better ways to teach him, though,” Tucker says. “If something went wrong here, couldn’t it mess up time?”
Clockwork grows old. Their lips curl into a smile as they turn their gaze on Tucker. “I am more careful than that. If Danny were to cause that timeline to dissolve, yours would still exist. He would have only been ejected back to me—and by then, he certainly would have seen what he needed to in order to help you.”
Tucker frowns at the gear, at Danny making all-dumb choices. “Why can we still look at it? If now this never happened.”
“It did happen,” Clockwork corrects. “Just not to you. Or to the Maddie and Jack Fenton of yours, or to the Vlad Masters of yours.”
“So it’s real because Danny remembers it?”
Clockwork recedes into youth. “It’s real because it happened. Even if he forgot, or if you did, or even I, it would still have occurred. It even saved you.” Their free hand reaches up to ghost over Tucker’s face, and as it does, it evokes the itch-raw sensation of ecto-acne—and, in the same instant, the soft relief of its cure.
On the gears, in the true-past, Danny enters the lab and tells the Fentons what to do. Tucker watches himself be treated. He remembers being there: remembers the scant hour between Danny’s leaving and his return, and he remembers—or now realizes, or comprehends—the true length of it; his time of sickness stilled and stretched into sideways hours. A retroactive agony. He feels dizzy.
A hand comes to rest on Tucker’s shoulder. A clarifying thing curls through his mind, and he steadies, blinking away song.
When he meets their eyes again, Clockwork is an adult, staff held loose in the hand not touching him. Their attention is entirely on Tucker.
“That’s enough for now, I believe,” they say, and Tucker closes his lips on a request to stay.
The time—and Tucker should have expected this, really—doesn’t slip away from him. Clockwork’s invitations to their lair are interjections spliced into the continuity of his life, or perhaps are departures from it. Regardless, after each visit he is returned to his friends mid-blink, his classes mid-word. The only lag is his own, remembering where he’d left off.
Tucker sees the parade from above. Clockwork shows it to him, and he furrows his brow and tries to predict it—sees in triplicate: where it was and is and may-yet-go. Clockwork shows him moments. They show him eons. And Tucker watches, because he is bid to, because he has never been one to pass up opportunity, and his head spins.
“Is this all you do? Sit around here and watch the timeline?” he asks once.
Clockwork, in adulthood, gives him a look, but does not reproach him. “Are you bored?”
“No,” Tucker says quickly.
Their lips curl, and they turn back to the gears. “You will be soon enough. Mine is possibly the most boring of all work.”
How can they be bored? Comprehending any of it takes all of Tucker’s attention; he spends his moments in here half with his eyes screwed shut, only feeling, parsing the song. Just as Tucker is about to speak, Clockwork adds, with an odd tilt to their voice: “And the most lonely.”
They twitch their hand and snag on something, and the gears display a moment Tucker hasn’t seen before, at least from this angle. Or—not a moment, he realizes, but a branch; the sound clears and he knows the tune. This is a continuity that arcs away from the primary timeline, then back again, grafted together. He remembers it vaguely, like a waking dream—and, seeing it now again from the outside, clarity overlaps the fog.
It was Sam’s mistake: an accident, really, a petty fight that led to the splinter and Danny dying again. Between then and the moment that Sam undid it all, wished to Desiree that it never happened, Tucker was—as he is so often—a mere outside observer. In the end he had been running away. And then things unraveled around them, and by the end of the movie they watched that same night, he couldn’t recall the steps that led them there.
“Why didn’t you interfere when that happened?” he asks.
“I hardly ever do,” they respond. “And your friend solved it quickly enough.”
“But why not?”
Clockwork turns to Tucker, and he sees an old exhaustion in their gaze. “It’s easier, to sit back and watch as people make their mistakes.” They let out a breath and grow old. “To forget about how things might have turned out different.”
And Tucker can hear it: those whispered may-yet-bes, the out of reach could-have-beens, the lengthy tunes that orbit Danny. And he can hear all his own hours of mortal feet slamming on pavement, chasing that bright streak as it sails ahead.
Time is brushed away from him. Tucker stills. He is on the edge of something—if only—
“My mistake,” Clockwork murmurs, mostly to themself. “I should have expected you to wonder.”
In town, on a Tuesday, Tucker buys a bag of chips from a corner store, and as the cashier checks him out, they ask where he’s headed next. He opens his mouth to speak. Subtly, the music branches before him, and he hears: “Oh, uh—sorry for your loss,” heading left and “Wish that were me” to the right.
Subconsciously, he leans right. “Just home,” he lies.
“Wish that were me.” The cashier shares a commiserating look with Tucker. They hand him his change. “Have a good one.”
“You too,” Tucker says, and he walks out, popping the bag open as he goes.
Outside, he turns left toward the cemetery to meet Sam and Danny for a picnic by the tombstone the town had established for Phantom. And he notices nothing out of place.
“Why is this your job, anyway?” Tucker asks eventually, at Clockwork’s left in their lair. They are not looking over the gears for once—instead, Clockwork has turned their attention to the clocks.
There are hundreds of them in Clockwork’s lair, all ticking out-of-sync. Tucker had thought they were for ambiance, but they do have purpose: they are conduits, or transformers, or… something. They catch and direct, like the teeth of a loom, and every so often they slow or fail. As Tucker watches, Clockwork, with gentle motions, turns one’s hands to their correct position.
“I mean, time would continue without you, right? Why need someone to watch over it?”
There’s a waver, and then something clicks, and some discordant low note Tucker hadn’t noticed blends again into song.
“You aren’t wrong,” Clockwork says after a moment. Their voice is as inscrutable as ever, but Tucker thinks he can just hear a bitter tinge. “But the Observants made their choice long ago. I am here to maintain it.”
“Their choice?”
“Think of time, as a whole, as wilderness. The primary timeline that I watch over is, by comparison, a garden.” Clockwork casts their gaze down the hall, toward the room with the gears. “A garden must be pruned and weeded and replanted. It needs a caretaker. Let alone, the wild would reclaim it.”
Tucker is quiet for a moment. He reaches, searching the noise for the could-be of Clockwork’s implication—but he can’t understand what he hears.
“Would that be bad?”
“No,” Clockwork says. They turn to him, and Tucker sees something in their eyes. Maybe awe. “But unrecognizable.”
And Tucker feels suddenly hungry for it. Just as quickly the feeling passes, and he’s left both wanting and not to reach back toward that incomprehensible perhaps.
“You don’t need to worry about it,” they say eventually. “I am an able gardener.”
For lack of anything to say—for lack of anything he could say—Tucker asks: “Do crops even grow in the Ghost Zone?” And then, hearing himself, he shuts up.
As they have now, for longer than Tucker ever would have hoped, Clockwork patiently endures him. “I could grow anything I wanted here, even extinct.” They pause. “Although I admit I have never tried.”
“Why not?”
“I have one purpose.”
Tucker frowns. “Maybe you should start an actual garden, dude.”
Clockwork looks at him again—he has their attention entirely—and there is some mischief in that gaze, some fondness. “Perhaps.”
In town, on a Thursday, Tucker grabs a stranger’s sleeve and stops them from crossing the road when the walk sign blinks on. They turn to snap at him, and in the same moment, a pickup truck screams through the intersection, narrowly avoiding a pedestrian coming from the other side.
The stranger stops. Tucker stops. And with a muttered “holy shit,” the stranger shakes him off and goes on their way.
Tucker does not cross the road. He is instead focusing on the music curling through him: a fatal could-have-been passing him by. And he notices, this time.
Tucker turns on his heel, and he is in Clockwork’s lair.
He asks: “Was that a mistake?”
Clockwork floats before him and looks on him for a long moment. A thousand worries scream through Tucker’s mind—and then Clockwork recedes into youth, and their lip curls up.
“No,” they say. “The timeline just took a less likely branch.”
“But I caused it.” Clockwork begins to move away, and Tucker follows them, reaching out, near-beseeching. “I knew it would happen before it did. Isn’t that—isn’t it cheating?”
“Would it have been cheating to look both ways before you walked?”
“I—no, but—”
“Time is not a picky thing, Tucker,” Clockwork says. They reach out and brush the long, dangling arms of one of the floating clocks. It stills for just a moment before rejoining the ticking chorus—different now, changed. “What happens does so immutably. It doesn’t have rules about who can influence it, or what changes it will or won’t make.” Their hand lingers. “It is dangerous, perhaps, to make changes toward your own end—for they do have consequences—but time itself thinks nothing of it.”
Tucker’s heart beats, and the song courses next to it so like another organ, something inside him reaching out.
“Then why—” he is saying, and he doesn’t know which of endless questions to ask: why does Clockwork only change things occasionally? Why did the Observants first choose to maintain the timeline? Why doesn’t everyone hear the song, or no one? Why does he?
Clockwork gently cuts him off. “You must decide yourself what you will be responsible for.”
With the same hand that had so casually stilled time, they place their palm against Tucker’s chest. It’s a gentle pressure, almost fatherly. Tucker doesn’t know what to do with that touch. He feels simultaneously like a child and a prey animal, altogether too small to be looked on by the being before him.
“I’m sorry,” Clockwork says. “I’ve never had to teach before—I should have shown you at the start. You don’t always have to listen.”
Tucker doesn’t remember when he first began to hear it, but now that he does, time’s tune is always there: a ticking symphony beside his heart. It’s unignorable; it’s near compulsion—even if Clockwork did not reach out to Tucker, he thinks he would have sought them out.
With the weight of their palm, Tucker can suddenly feel it so clearly: that route in him through which time sings. Clockwork motions to him, and at their prompting, tentatively Tucker mirrors them: he places his own hand against Clockwork’s glass chest. And he can feel the song in them now, like river rapids, and for a moment he breathes, just feeling. Then, without warning, Clockwork’s course narrows to a trickle. It swells in volume again, and then quiets, and as he feels it Tucker mimics Clockwork automatically. In his own chest, the song softens.
He sags with sudden relief—and then the absence scares him, and he lets the noise swell again, drowning out all else. Clockwork’s eyebrows knit as Tucker pulls away.
“Why isn’t Danny the one here?” he asks, unthinking, helpless.
“The world doesn’t actually revolve around him,” Clockwork says, “even if you do.”
They gently push him back, and Tucker is again on the sidewalk corner. The person he saved is still crossing the street. The truck that had gunned through the intersection is screeching around a corner a block away. All keeps moving—the song plays uninterrupted—and Tucker for a moment can’t bear it. For a moment, he wants stillness more than he’s wanted anything.
Between homework, hanging out with Danny and Sam, and the moments Clockwork spirits him away, Tucker starts tinkering.
He’s never been a hardware guy. He prefers software, programming, poking at the mind of the thing rather than its guts. But he can adapt. This requires engineering, and Tucker isn’t going to ask for help; he wouldn’t know how to even if he wanted to try.
So, with what materials he can find, Tucker builds a frame like a gear and starts arranging its organs: ports to let in, wires to direct, a small CPU to interpret and change. It’s a computer—of course it would be; it’s what he does—but it’s also a conduit. And, he finds, something ghostly. While Tucker wasn’t looking, it started to glow.
When it’s finished, he doesn’t know what he’s made. On paper he does. It is a tiny computer, connected to nothing; a mind to think with nothing to think on—but it sits on his desk for a week, waiting, and Tucker has no idea what to do with it. He hardly even remembers why he’d started building it in the first place; the past week is all blur, but for the tug in his gut, and Tucker wonders if this is what Danny feels like when the mist escapes his mouth.
After another week of staring at and fidgeting with it, his mother walks into his room one night, just as Tucker had been moving to pick it up yet again. It is as she opens her mouth to speak that his fingers touch the gear, and she stops.
The world stills before him.
And finally the time-fog clears, and Tucker remembers—how had he forgotten?—the first time he met Clockwork: those strange enemies, the medallions strung around necks, the future that now will never be theirs.
Tucker lifts his hand from the gear. The world resumes. He lets his mother speak—she calls him to dinner, and he agrees; yes, he’ll be down in just a minute. And when she disappears from the doorway, Tucker takes the gear—the medallion—in his palm, and he steps outside of time.
Tucker takes the stairs. By the time he reaches the landing, he is in Clockwork’s lair. They wait for him, hand on their staff, but Tucker looks elsewhere first: he turns his gaze toward the stretch of wall where the medallions had innocently hung. The pegs are there, but they are empty.
“Is this why I’m here?” His voice comes out small. “You were interested in me because eventually I’d make something useful to you?”
“No,” Clockwork says. “You are not here to make the medallions.” Then, before Tucker can protest: “You made them because you were here.”
He scoffs. “That’s the same thing.”
“It isn’t,” Clockwork says, and they’re smiling. “And regardless, you did not make them for me.”
“But… they’re your time medallions.”
Clockwork looks at him with a chastising expression. “Tucker, they are your time medallions.” With a pointed gesture of their staff, they say: “I do not need another device for my work. You made them for your own needs.”
“I don’t get it.”
Again, Clockwork moves forward and presses a palm to Tucker’s chest. Together they take stock of time as it moves through him: a cacophonous rush. Tucker is tuned all the way in, and as Clockwork raises their eyebrows, his face heats.
“You wanted a way to rest without giving up responsibility,” they say, and let their hand fall. “A time out.”
Tucker lets out a breath. And then he sags. The disappointment he’d primed himself to feel dissipates, and again he wonders: if not for the medallions, why is Clockwork entertaining him?
After a long moment, Tucker asks: “Do you even want me here?”
“Yes,” they say, clearly, true.
“Why?”
For a moment, they only look at him, and Tucker stands arrested by their gaze.
“You chose to listen,” Clockwork says. And then, with a fond expression: “And I wondered if you would help me plant that garden.”