counter clockwise

Who: Alyson and Zach
Where: Zach’s shop
When: Late morning/early afternoon

Alyson had only just started seeing him around. He was a curious fellow, strange not only in nature but by design as well. His coloring was off, the most obvious of differences, and thus, he'd not only grabbed her attention, but the very idea of him enthralled her.

She'd scoured numerous books in attempt to better understand, though that hadn't helped at all. The text told her it was a skin condition of some sort (or simply a condition at all). Clearly that wasn't the case. If it was a condition, it was a coloring one and perhaps it could be fixed with the proper paints.

Not that Alyson would dare bring paints to this stranger. That would have been rude. Instead, she brought one Rabbit the Second. They were adventuring, she'd told her rabbit, on a mission to learn about this terribly off person and to perhaps, were they to want the help, to help them get back 'on' again, be it with paints or kind words.

Alyson pushed open the door to the store, a building she hadn't stepped in before. "Hello?" she called out. "Is there anybody here?"

Zach was in the back room of the shop when he heard the bell over the door ring out through the slightly dusty air. His fear--bordering on paranoia--of theft led him to keep all the windows shut and locked all year round, and it tended to get a bit stuffy inside. He pushed back from his work table with a slight sigh, sorry to abandon the lovely child-size fob watch he was working on, but the next layer of gears could wait. People could, too, but they generally weren’t inclined to do him that courtesy. He stepped into the open doorway between the mismatched rooms and peered curiously at the girl standing in the middle of his shop with.... a rabbit?

Watching Zach think was a lot like watching someone’s expression as they flipped through a filing cabinet. He began immediately to try to place her from the clues, to summon up as much information as he could before a word was said. Odd girl, looked young, rabbit along for the ride. The name to go with that description would have to be Alyson Walker, not so young as she looked, of the well-off Walker family. Considered a bit strange, though sweet, in higher social circles than his own rather meager one. A slight frown creased his brow above the wire frames of his spectacles, but he summoned up a hint of a smile as he inclined his head respectfully.

“Good afternoon, dear. What brings you in this fine day?” It’s not a fine day at all, but he pretends like he’s trying to make it one. People seem to prefer optimism to realism most of the time.

Alyson was the sort of person who ate optimism for breakfast. She had quite successfully deluded herself entirely when it came down to it, and despite the drab city they lived in (with all its crime and horror), she managed to keep in positive spirits almost always (the exceptions, of course, were on the far-too-rainy days that Sir Rabbit decided to throw a fit).

Her expression as she studied Zach was considerably less calculating. She had watched him (little did she know she’d presumed his gender incorrectly). “It is a good afternoon,” she agreed, even if Zach hadn’t meant a word of it. It wasn’t pouring the rain like yesterday, and that was more than enough to keep Alyson in even higher spirits. After all, weather never kept Alyson inside and she had most likely worn her immune system out with all the bustling about the day before.

There was a smile on her lips as she continued, “Well, Rabbit--” She paused, glancing at the rabbit and wrinkling her nose. “Ah, pardon me. Sir Rabbit has an issue with his pocket watch. He asked me not to come, but I thought I should anyway.” The rabbit’s ears twitched and Alyson gave a small sigh. “You’ll have to forgive him. He can be quite rude at times. Is there a place I can set him down? His watch is bundled up with him.” The watch, of course, had just been an excuse to get a closer look, but it was broken nonetheless.

Zach stared at her for a moment, that slight furrow never leaving his brow. He just looked bemused at first, but a little too slow a slight quirk twitched up the corners of his lips into something like a smile. As if his day wasn’t shaping up to be strange enough already.... “You can set him up here, if you--” he wanted to say must, but picked a better substitute at the last second “--like.” He walked over to indicate the counter, moving behind it the way a business owner ought to do and resting a hand on the smooth, entirely uncluttered expanse of it.

He waited for her to bring the rabbit over, though inwardly he dreaded the thought of an animal up on his perfectly clean counter, leaving little hairs all over that could get caught in the gears of a watch, and then he’d have to take it apart and put it back together... He tried, however, to affect a polite and friendly demeanor as he waited for her to show the item in question. He would just have to hope that there really was a watch, some sort of familiar ground to keep under his feet.

Had Alyson been more aware of how the world actually functioned, she might have thought twice before putting her rabbit on the counter. It stayed burrowed in its scarf, but she did manage to unwind the watch in question -- a gold pocket watch, engraved with an unreadable language. She held it up to show Zach and said, “It ticks wrong. Tick, tick, tock, not tick, tock, tick, tock.”

She glanced towards her rabbit for a moment and nodded, “We think it has a cold, as it’s quite slow, too.” She gave a sympathetic frown to the watch -- now she felt guilty for using it to further investigate this man, especially since it was sick. She’d be sure to polish it and apologize profusely later. “He’s always been kind of funny. He used to run entire marathons, speeding through the days before they were even finished.”

The watch was an antique, something she had dug out of the attic and given to Rabbit the Second as a birthday gift one year. If asked, of course, they hadn’t simply ‘dug it out of the attic’ -- there was an entire adventure behind it, of course, involving one very angry witch and perhaps even a troll.

Though he shuddered slightly as the rabbit was placed in the center of his orderly little world, with its hairs ready to spread throughout and cause all sorts of mayhem, Zach couldn’t help but perk up a little at the sight of the watch. To his well-trained eye it looked immensely old, the carving of the outer case elegant and impossibly complex for the more utilitarian style popular in current pieces. He held out his hand and let her lay it in his pale palm, cradling it with a love and respect he rarely showed for people. “Let’s see, then...” he murmured, popping open the hunter case to reveal the unblemished crystal face behind its carving. He held it delicately up to his ear to listen for the odd pattern she mentioned, and there it was, sure enough.

Most adults would hear stories of a watch with a cold who used to run marathons and dismiss it as silly, but Zach was already considering the underlying implications. She was observant, this girl, even if she drew entirely the wrong conclusions from that observation. Such a positive trait gave him a better impression over all, warming him toward the odd girl who was interrupting his day. He listened a little longer, then pulled a magnifier from under the countertop to peer closely at the edges of the case, the key set above the twelve, looking for any kind of maker’s mark out of his own curiosity.

“This is a really beautiful piece.” He informed her, looking rather impressed. “I wonder who made it. I should be able to fix it up--get it back into shape.” He frowned briefly, though. He could hardly do the work for free, but he desperately wanted to see the inside--he was praying that she would have an answer ready for his next question. “Can you--er, I mean, can.... Sir Rabbit.... afford the repairs?” He indicated a small sign on the front of the counter listing out various service prices. He’d charge a little less, the rate for one of his own pieces, just to get a look inside, surely a girl from the Walker family would have more than enough pocket money.

There was an obvious delicacy and care that showed as Zach handled the watch, and it was something that Alyson could appreciate. It was the same way she handled her books, though of course, she couldn’t repair them quite like one could repair a watch. “I think it’s always been in the family,” Alyson told him, though little did she know that she hadn’t always been in the family, “but it was locked up in a box, and I thought ‘This watch must be getting lonely’, so I took it out.” That was the most reasonable thing Alyson could say about the box -- there were no stories of rescuing it from a dragon yet.

“Of course we can pay!” she smiled. “Whatever it takes, really, we just don’t want him to be sick anymore.” Her smile curved into a slight pout. “It’s always difficult to hear a friend struggling, even if it is something as simple as the sniffles.” Of course, she didn’t know if her watch had the sniffles, or if it had a more ‘serious’ illness. Either way, Alyson Walker would leave no watch left behind.

Zach offered up a rare, if somewhat short-lived, smile. It was a brief flash, but it made his features seem far less hard-edged and stern. “It shouldn’t take more than two days to fix, by the sound of it. May have to cut a few new gears, it sounds like one’s missing a few teeth, but I can handle it.” He looked sidelong at the rabbit, and struggled not to show his upset at the continued presence of a fur-bearing animal in his shop. “Will that be alright for you and... Um... Sir Rabbit?” he asked finally, hoping that maybe a reminder of the rabbit’s presence would prompt her to gather her pet back up.

The smile made Alyson feel a tad bit more at ease, though the mention of missing teeth seemed to make her even more sympathetic for her watch. “No wonder it sounded funny,” she mused. People without teeth sounded odd as well (they tended to whistle on accident, she’d found). “Did it have cavities?” It was the only thing she could think of that would make teeth disappear (and clearly, her image of teeth was different from the reality of the situation).

She gave a small nod. “That will be fine,” she responded, smiling again. His plan worked as she’d glanced to Rabbit the Second and scooped him back up in her arms.

Curiosity got the best of her, though, and she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Did you ever paint as a child?”

At first, Zach was so absorbed in renewed examination of the watch that he didn’t seem to hear her last question--the first had been answered with an absent-minded “Something like that...” just to prove that he was listening. After a moment, though, his usually quick mind caught up with the sound of her voice, and he lifted a brow in sudden confusion. He--very hard--to come up with something else she could have said, some more sensible phrase that he could conceivably have mistaken for ‘Did you ever paint as a child,’ but he couldn’t come up with anything that might sound like that.

“Um... I don’t really remember?” he stammered finally, confusion etched clearly into the odd little frown on his face. “Why on earth do you ask?” Fortunately for Alyson, he looks merely perplexed, and not offended or angry.

A watch having cavities, and thus bad teeth, was the explanation that made the most sense to Alyson, and it was the one she ran with. “Do you give them fillings?” It was the cure for a human’s teeth, and she wondered just how similar a watch’s teeth were. Watches were made of metal and were therefore cared for differently -- she couldn’t imagine taking a tooth brush to the gears of a watch (well, she could, but wouldn’t it rust?).

Had Alyson had any inkling how odd (and possibly offensive) her thought process was, she would have perhaps tried to redirect or reword it. It all made sense to her, though, so she continued, “You don’t look like you painted much.” She stroked the forehead of Rabbit the Second. “Perhaps you should try it. Finger painting is the most fun.” She smiled as the Rabbit twitched in her hands. “Ah, but Sir Rabbit disagrees. To each their own.”

Zach stared openly at her for a moment that stretched and twisted out between them like a snake shedding its skin. A crease formed in his brow, the very one he worked so hard to erase for her, the one that lived comfortably with him on an average and often frustrating day of dealing with people. His mouth turned uncertainly to one side, and he tried to work out a decent and socially acceptable way to respond to such an obviously unbalanced individual. He had found it cute at first, but now this was getting well past that point. “I find I’m extremely unsure of what you mean by all this talk of paint, ma’am.” he managed finally, though he was still trying to focus on the watch, to keep himself calm and serene and above the world in spite of its clear attempts to invade his day.

“I’m afraid I don’t have enough time to finger paint and make the necessary repairs on this handsome watch of yours--er--of your rabbit’s, so it will have to wait.” he finished, strain evident in voice, practically begging her to just let him alone, he couldn’t handle much more of this oddity in his neatly kept world.

It wasn’t hard to miss Zach’s irritation, and Alyson gave him a slight frown. “Well, pardon me,” she replied in a huff. She’d taken Zach’s reaction as rudeness, because she simply couldn’t comprehend the idea of an antisocial individual. Sure, she had been around them before, and she’d tried to find rhyme or reason behind how they acted, but it all came down to an underlying bitterness that Alyson refused to allow in her life (and with her delusional nature, it was easy to pick and choose what she believed in).

“We’ll just leave you be then. When should we come back for our watch?”

The relief in his tone was almost pitiful. Past the apparent rudeness, Zach was, at heart, a sad young man much of the time, and very few things worked to put off the darkness. A little peace and quiet was the best remedy that he could afford, and he was flooded with an uncharacteristic surge of gratitude at the suggestion that she might give him that, even if she did make it under duress. “Three days should be more than enough time, ma’am. He’ll be back on his feet in no time. In fact, you can come back the day after tomorrow if you’d like, I may even be finished them.”

Never mind that repairs on someone else’s work usually took weeks to complete--he had every intention of getting it done immediately, to spend whole nights immersed in its beautiful order finding and fixing the ravages of time and disuse. It would be the best thing he’d done for himself in ages, and the fact that it was for someone else was entirely unimportant.

Two to three days. Alyson could remember that. “We’ll be back then,” she told him, still slightly annoyed but willing to try and push that feeling away. He was relieved, which was offensive, but she would let it go for now. This entire mission had been investigative, first and foremost. She couldn’t lose sight of that. “Thank you,” she told him, with a mock curtsy (slightly strange, as she had Rabbit in her arms).

With that, Alyson turned and left the man in peace.