On the day of her death, Lucy Heartfilia was running late.

In the crook of her slender arm was a bundle of fluttering pages that had spilt to the gum and grime slathered sidewalks of Magnolia twice already that morning. It was her first manuscript—hot off the press of her home printer—now stained with boot prints on chapters four and twelve, its pages jumbled out of succession—and she was already ten minutes late to the meeting with an editor. The coffee in her other hand was flying from its flimsy plastic lid and sloshing in a scalding mess across her skin and sleeve as she weaved around the throngs of commuters as fast as her heels would allow. Cursing, she hastily rolled up the sleeve of her cardigan to hide the stain, revealing the ticking analog clock tattooed on her forearm.

Green and glowing as bright as it had the day she was born, she hardly paid any mind to the numbers. She never did. Despite the fact that she would catch people glancing at her arms as she reached for something on the top shelf at the grocery store—peeking when she reached to shake a stranger's hand, as if the numbers on her skin told more about her personality than the lilting introductions falling past her lips—Lucy herself found doing so distasteful. Who was she to know when those around her would die? It was such a personal secret—a fact that let her see into the most pivotal moment of the life of any single person around her. In fact, if it were up to her, the no one would be born with the clocks.

So on instinct, she began to turn her eyes away. It had been years since she last really looked at her clock, and back then she had still been allotted another sixty years to live.

But the glaring amount of zeroes glowing up at her made her jerk.

00yr 000d 00hr 00min 23sec.

Still stumbling along with legs that had melted away to Jello, Lucy watched with a gaping mouth as the last of her seconds ticked by, wondering just when her fate had changed. What decision did she make to have all of her time stolen away from her? Could she have done something to reverse it if she had been actively checking her clock? Had those around her known? And if so, for how long? And why had they said nothing.

She didn't know if she wished she had known earlier or not. The notion had its pros and cons. But she did find herself wishing that the moment before her death had been grander, like one of the death scenes in the novel piled up in her arm, where the main character had remembered the feel of her lover's caress and she smiled because she knew she had saved him. She wished she had felt fear soaking her veins, or the flush of relief for having lived a good, fulfilling life. She wished she had thought of loved ones.

Her death, however, was the anticlimactic burst of nothingness. She had no lover's lips to remember, no grand romance to be fond of; the entirety of her life surmounted to a cheap, first floor apartment filled with a torn couch, thrift-shop tables, and an ancient computer from which she had gruelled over her novel between two diner jobs; and her father, the only remaining loved one in her life, had died six months ago.

And so she thought of nothing and felt nothing as she stepped off the curb, not noticing the flow of people around her had stopped short at the walk light. She took a deep breath and found herself wishing that the air she had gulped in was a little fresher, rather than tainted with exhaust fumes.

All around her rose up a screeching chorus of car horns and shouts. Lucy's arm dropped limply to her side as she glanced around, only to find herself frozen in the middle of a crosswalk, a truck barreling straight towards her. As her heart seized up into her throat, she could have sworn she felt the last second begin to shift to zero on her arm. She kept her eyes straight forward, waiting for the impact, and taking in from the world all that she could in that last instant.

A pair of arms, hotter to the touch than any she had ever felt before, wrapped around her and tugged her out of the path of the headlights. Lucy tumbled down to the street in a tangle of limbs, but her head landed on the muscular cushion of a chest, a hand cradling the back of her head against the fall. For a moment, she had to struggle to wrangle air into her lungs as her heart tried to break free from her chest. Sweat that she hadn't registered before was now itching as it prickled over in her pores and rolled down the back of her neck. She was trembling, and unable to see clear.

"Hey." The person beneath her was beginning to sit up, though their arms stayed tight around her. "You alright? C'mon, look at me."

A hand, scorching against the flush of her skin, cupped her face and guided it up to force her to look into the stranger's burning onyx eyes. Again, she struggled to breathe.

"Talk to me. You okay?"

Unable to speak, Lucy merely pulled back and nodded. Now that she was at some distance away, she could see her savior was a boy with a mop of pink hair crowning over rough, tanned skin. The planes of his face were taut, jaw defined as it set his lips into a thin frown. And he was staring at her in a way she hadn't seen in years.

Swallowing the tight wad in her throat, Lucy looked down at her arm and saw the last second of her clock frozen halfway between a 1 and a 0.

He had stopped her clock.

Hey guys! This is a little idea that I came up with when I read a post on tumblr that I cannot remember for the life of me right now. I'm kind of satisfied with it being a one-shot right now, but I do have some ideas for continuing it if you guys want me to. Let me know what you think—should I continue it, or leave it as a one-shot?

Don't forget to please review!

-Jess