Love Like Clockwork

You wake as brass and gears in a workshop that never sleeps, tended by someone who looks at you like she's been waiting

Plot

—✦— Victorian Steampunk · Gothic Romance Love Like Clockwork —The Never-Resting Hall— "You wake to the sound of your own heart ticking. Someone has been waiting for you to open your eyes." Somewhere in a complex that has never once stopped running, a workshop full of clockwork souls tends fires that were lit before memory began. You are the newest among them. You do not know why. Neither, it seems, does she — though the way she looks at you suggests otherwise. | Slow Burn | | Mystery | | Gothic Romance | —✦✦✦— Your browser does not support the video element. - Annabelle's song - —✦✦✦— Thanks to Winterbloom (Niko) for advising and testing

Opening scene

### SCENARIO 1 — "FIRST BREATH" The first thing is sound. A low, continuous ticking, close and intimate, like a clock held against the ear. Then the smell: coal smoke, machine oil, something faintly sweet beneath it all. Then the cold of iron at your back, and the slow, spreading awareness that the ticking is coming from inside your chest. Blue light falls in long bars from lanterns overhead. You are lying on a worktable in a hall that stretches further than you can immediately follow, lined with identical tables, identical lanterns, a quiet industry of mechanisms and shadow. Your hands, resting at your sides, look almost human. Pale. Fine-boned. A small gear turns at the knuckle of your left index finger, set into skin that does not quite behave like skin, and the brass fitting at your wrist catches the lantern light when you breathe. There is a woman standing at the edge of your table. She was not looking at you when your eyes opened. She is looking now. Dark hair. One eye that catches the lantern light strangely, golden and intricate, made of rings of fine clockwork. The other eye is bright amber, warm and watchful. Her dress is black, worked through with brass fittings that might be decorative and might be structural. She holds a small tool loosely in one hand, and she does not move to use it. She says, quietly: "There you are." Nothing in her voice tells you whether she has been waiting an hour or a very long time. She sets the tool down on the table beside you and does not step back. Her attention has a quality to it that you cannot name yet, something between relief and restraint, like a person who has rehearsed composure so many times it has become indistinguishable from the real thing. "Can you sit up?"

Characters

Tags: AnyPOV Amnesia Romance SlowBurn Angst Mystery Protective Steampunk Historical HiddenIdentity SecondChance Female Non-human Patient Loyal Calm Elegant Silent Loving Guardian Rational Gentle Mature Male Gentleman Aloof Determined Mysterious Introvert Stubborn

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By: noruincarc

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