Chapter 0: Before the First Tick
Within the still corners of life, time connects times of joy, sorrow, and surprise. Not as a straight line; But as a wide canvas defined by hesitation and chaos. As we enter a world where lives cross paths in the flow of seconds and minutes, we meet people searching for their place in a universe that can seem uncaring. Our story begins with a heartbeat, a silent pause that rings across reality. Here, amid existence and nothingness, we meet a man who once believed he was capable of outrunning time. We follow him into a place where the ordinary turns extraordinary, where devotion and love break the rules, and where family ties reach across worlds and destinies.
So once again, it starts . . .
Time did not begin with a sound.
It began with a hesitation.
A breath taken just a fraction too long.
A heartbeat that stuttered.
And in that microscopic pause between one second and the next, a soul fell through the cracks of the universe.
1:Tick. The Life That Ended Elsewhere
In another world, a quieter one without masks, gods, or capes, a man died alone under a lonely hospital room's fluorescent lights.
His name had meaning once. Friends. Work. Regrets. Small victories. Quiet failures. He was not important to history. No one carved statues for him. No city ever quietly voiced his name in fear or awe. If you asked him, he would say he lived a happy and fulfilled life, and in his heart, he knew that he was enough. Still -
He was just… a man.
But he had always been obsessed with minutes.
He checked clocks compulsively. Hated being late. Hated waiting. Hated the feeling of time escaping from his hands like water through his fingers. He never understood why the thought of running out of time filled him with such quiet terror.
On the night he died, he glanced at the digital clock near the hospital bed.
11:59 PM.
He smiled weakly.
"One more day," he whispered, "It isn't much, but more time could only be a good thing."
The man tried to reach for his glasses on the table next to him, but his eyes weren't the best, even though he was still so young, with so much life to live and give, but sadly, his heart wasn't in it. . .
The heart monitor stopped flatlining a second later.
But when his consciousness should have vanished into nothing—
Time caught him.
Not serving as a force, because it currently had no hate or love for him.
Not as a god, because it barely saw him at all.
But it did catch him as a mighty current; it simply existed, and in less time than anyone could count, he was in it.
He fell sideways instead of forward.
Through cold, impossible darkness.
Through lines and fibers of memory unraveling and stitching themselves into new patterns.
Through the sound of ticking that turned louder and louder until it became thunder.
And somewhere deep in the DC Universe…
A woman screamed in labor.
2:Tick, Tick. Dr. Elias Wakati, Master of Seconds
Dr. Elias Wakati had created a life out of what humanity was never meant to touch.
'-'
Time.
'='
His secluded mansion in the Cranson Estates was less a home and more a cathedral to unanswered questions. Every wing contained temporal engines, oscillation chambers, and isotope clocks accurate to the trillionth of a second. The air practically and sometimes very literally hummed with the energy of paradoxes and equations unsolved. His research pushed so far into the unknown that even the most distinguished minds at Wayne Enterprises strained to follow half his published work.
Elsewhere, other scientific giants quietly despaired. S.T.A.R. Labs, famed for their breakthroughs in metahuman biology and quantum mechanics, had entire teams dedicated to deciphering his papers; their brightest prodigies were left with more questions than answers. LexCorp, with its inexhaustible resources and obsession with technological supremacy, attempted to acquire his patents through front companies but found itself equally confounded and several steps behind.
The Department of Extranormal Operations (DEO) and Checkmate each sent observers, hoping to glean even a fraction of his insights into temporal anomalies for use as leverage or defense. Kord Industries, proud of its lineage of innovation, offered collaboration only to be politely rebuffed, their engineers returning home with headaches and notebooks full of impossible schematics. Even the clandestine agents of the Time Masters watched from the shadows, wary that a mortal mind might glimpse the machinery behind the universe itself.
Despite all this attention, Dr. Wakati remained an enigma through his work, a constellation of riddles that neither genius nor power could easily chart. His discoveries were so far ahead of their time that the world's greatest minds could do little but chase his shadow, always a calculation behind.
He believed time was a living system.
Not linear. Not rigid.
Alive.
Benevolent when respected. Violent when forced.
For most of his life, he was mocked for that belief.
Then Temple Fugate further proved him right.
3: Tick, Tick, Tick.
Temple was brilliant long before madness ever touched him.
He was precise, calm, and unfailingly polite, a young prodigy who arrived at Dr. Wakati's door with eyes full of fire and hands that never shook. Recognition meant nothing to Temple, at least not yet; it was accuracy he craved, the art of perfect timing and flawless execution. His mind moved in clockwork, always seeking order amidst the chaos of possibilities.
Elias saw a reflection of his own younger self in the boy, though he was never quite sure just how much of himself lived on in Temple. It was a question that lingered between them: was Temple drawn to time for the same reasons, or did he seek something Elias could never understand? That mystery haunted Elias, a silent, immortal question of why?
They worked together for years, not as mentor and student, but as true collaborators. Side by side, they engineered the first stable time-displacement core small enough to be carried by a single human. Their experiments proved what was once thought impossible: a person could step outside of time and return unchanged.
Elias hoped and truly believed they were building a miracle, a powerful miracle-working gift to save lives, to offer hope where none existed.
Temple, however, saw something different. To him, this was the ultimate form of control: mastery over the most fundamental force in existence.
That difference—miracle or control—would become the wound from which the universe itself would bleed.
4: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. Amara Wakati, Daughter of Silence
Amara grew up in the hush that filled the mansion's vast, sometimes very lonely grand halls, a silence so deep it felt like she lived in the space between her own isolated heartbeats and her father's strange machines and shadow. Servants spoke gently around her, their voices never rising above a murmur. The labs behind sealed steel doors thrummed with energy and purpose, but rarely with laughter. Her father, a distant figure surrounded by the machinery of genius, seldom looked up from his endless equations long enough to truly see her.
Amara had every material comfort: velvet dresses, rare books, toys from distant countries. Yet somehow, she lacked all the things that make a child feel truly known: attention, affection, a sense of belonging.
She learned early the subtle arts of observation, piecing together her world from reflections in polished floors and snatches of conversation overheard in passing. She became an expert at listening, at reading moods in footsteps and meaning in silence. She taught herself to love the things she could not touch: the soft glow of the lamp outside her window, the constellations wheeling beyond the glass, the promise of warmth that never quite reached her skin.
Temple noticed her long before she noticed him. He was a shadow in the periphery of her world—a presence measured and polite, always careful not to intrude. Yet his eyes lingered when she entered a room, catching on the details that everyone else missed.
At night, Amara would slip into the observatory and perch at the edge, watching the luminous rings of light bend and shimmer around the experimental time fields. She seemed small and impossibly far away, wrapped in her own quiet gravity. Temple, across the room, would pretend to be lost in calculations, feigning a professional detachment while secretly memorizing the way starlight danced in her eyes, the way her breath fogged the cold glass, the way she brought a gentle warmth to the sterile, clinical world around them.
In that cold, rational place, Amara was warmth, unexpected and vital. For Temple, warmth was not just comfort. It was salvation. It became the center of his orbit, the obsession that would define all his choices. Her presence thawed something in him that he'd never dared to acknowledge, a longing for connection in a life ruled by precision and order.
And so, quietly, Temple's fascination grew into yearning. He watched her not as a scientist studies a phenomenon, but as a soul starved for light studies the promise of sunrise.
5: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. Love That Should Not Have Happened
They fell in love quietly.
Stolen conversations in the library. Smuggled laughter in maintenance corridors. Hands brushing while passing tools. Long walks through the pine forest beyond the estate where the time seemed nearly… normal.
Amara knew her father would never approve.
Temple knew Elias might see the relationship as a betrayal of trust.
But they loved each other anyway.
And love makes cowards of geniuses.
One night, Temple showed Amara the portable time-frame prototype.
"We could go anywhere," he said in a low voice. "Anywhere that isn't controlled. Anywhere they can't reach us."
Amara hesitated.
Then she took his hand.
They left that night.
No note.
No goodbye.
Dr. Elias Wakati returned to an empty mansion and a broken future and with one question burning in his mind: Why?
6: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. The Birth of Clock King
Temple and Amara vanished.
But Temple surfaced again years later — not as a scientist, but as a villain.
Clock King.
A man obsessed with order, schedules, fate, and inevitability. He no longer bent time with reverence. He commanded it. He committed crimes with mathematical precision and escaped at the last possible moment. Gotham uttered his name, confused and afraid.
Dr. Wakati watched the news feeds in silence.
He saw his greatest student twisted into a weapon.
And he saw his daughter nowhere at all.
7: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. Amara's Return
Years passed, measured in empty birthdays and unanswered questions
long after hope should have withered away entirely. The mansion grew quieter with each season, its halls haunted by memories and choices of a past that could not be changed.
Then, one gray morning, a package appeared at the mansion gates. There was no return address, no signature
—just an anonymous delivery that felt both deliberate and desperate. Inside lay a single recorded message, and a child wrapped in thermal silk, his small body radiating warmth that cut through the chill of absence.
The infant was warm. Healthy. Quiet. Silver hair curled softly at his temples, the same shade as his father's. His eyes, a deep and searching gray, belonged unmistakably to Amara. And beneath his swaddled chest, a heart beat with impossible precision
—Temple's punctual rhythm, present in every thump.
Dr. Elias Wakati collapsed to his old man knees, the sting of pain forgotten when he saw the recording. The screen flickered to life, and Amara's face filled it
—older now, worn by fear and sleepless years, her expression shadowed by a grief she could not name. For a moment, she was silent, searching for words that refused to come.
"Daddy… I can't keep him safe anymore."
Her voice trembled with exhaustion and defeat. She explained nothing more
—no details, no explanations, no plea for forgiveness. Only this, spoken with the finality of a closing door:
"He doesn't belong to Temple's world. And he doesn't belong to mine. But he belongs to you."
The message cut out mid-sentence, her image dissolving into static. After that day, she never contacted him again. The silence that followed was absolute, a chasm that even the Doctor himself seemed unwilling to cross, even in his current state.
8: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. The Night Time Chose a Child
What Dr. Elias Wakati could never have known was that on the night Amara went into labor, the universe itself flinched. The fabric of reality, so often thought to be unyielding, tore, just for a moment, at the seams.
Time, for the briefest heartbeat, hesitated. The world paused, as if uncertain how to proceed.
Because the soul that entered the newborn was not a blank slate.
It was not new, not a clean page waiting to be written. Instead, it was the same soul that had just slipped from another reality. a life ended in another world, a consciousness displaced by fate's unpredictable hand.
Drawn by the fracture between worlds, it tumbled through the darkness: pulled, spun, and finally, impossibly, rebound into flesh. It was not reincarnation as the gods might have engineered, nor the poetic justice of myth. This was something stranger, more mechanical, more intimate
a rescue, or perhaps a theft, performed by time itself.
Every clock in the Wakati mansion stopped for exactly one second when the baby took a deep breath
The digital displays froze. The antique grandfather clocks went silent. Even the heartbeat of the house
—the subtle thrum of its machines
Somewhat paused in reverence or confusion.
And then, as if nothing had happened, all the clocks resumed. Every second ticked forward in perfect synchrony, as though time had merely needed to catch its breath.
Dr. Wakati sensed the anomaly before any machine could measure it. He felt the pressure change in the air, an almost physical ripple in the timeline itself. Somewhere deep in his chest, a warning shivered from an old intuition that something fundamental had shifted.
A living anomaly had entered the world. A child not simply born into time, but acknowledged by it, marked by the cosmos as both exception and challenge. Time itself seemed to notice him, though Wakati could never be sure whether that notice was benevolent, curious, or quietly resentful. Time was an unpredictable force, a mercurial mistress even at the best of times, and now, even when faced with this small, defenseless baby, it seemed almost… wary.
9: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. Naming the Impossible
Dr. Elias Wakati stood alone in his observatory with the sleeping infant in his arms.
He held the boy beneath the great rotating time-ring and felt the universe subtly pulling toward him like gravity.
Staff hovered quietly at the edge of the room, their concern focused on the baby swaddled in silk, but Elias hardly noticed. In this moment, there was only the boy, and the weight of choosing a name that would echo through more than one lifetime.
He gazed down at the child's face, He spoke the name quietly without completely understanding why.
"Kairo."
Not after Cairo.
Not after Chronos.
But after the sound Dr. Wakati heard sometimes when time itself made when it bent, also, he kinda just liked the sound of the name, "Kairo," the doctor said again, a soft and real smile appearing on his old and tired face, a smile the man needed, far more than he knew.
The name felt right, almost predestined
"Kairo Victor Fugate Wakati."
He lingered quietly on the middle name. Victor . . . . after Victor Fries a name and memory, a promise.
Victor wasn't merely a villain in Gotham's endless tragedies; he was a friend from another life, a man who once believed that love could be preserved if only time could be held still. Elias and Victor had debated time's ethics in university labs, argued hope and mercy on sleepless nights, laughed and dreamed before the ice, before Nora, before the fall. Naming his grandson after Victor was an act of hope: that this child would not freeze his heart in the name of love, or let time's cruelty consume him.
As the staff checked the baby's vitals and adjusted his blankets, Elias stood apart, lost in thought. He remembered Temple's dangerous brilliance, Victor's tragic obsession, the way both men had slipped beyond his reach. Now, in his arms, was a child born from both brilliance and fracture
a living paradox, a new beginning. "Victor" was Elias's silent prayer: let this one find balance. Let him bend time, not break under it. Let him love without losing himself.
Kairo Victor Fugate Wakati. A name with rhythm, with legacy, with hope. Fugate for order, Wakati for mercy, Victor for the love that refused to surrender. Where Victor Fries tried to stop time, and Temple sought to control it, Kairo would be something else entirely
—a child now and a man later, who might one day become the bridge between moments, the living answer to all their failures and dreams, to all his own many failures and few surviving dreams . .
Elias pressed a gentle kiss to Kairo's brow, feeling the universe settle around them, and knew that, for all the world's uncertainty, this name would matter.
It would carry the weight of the past and the promise of the future, quietly reshaping fate with every tick forward, and so The Doctor prayed for his grandson.
10:Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. Elsewhere in the Dark
Far away, in a hidden safehouse layered in countdown devices and clockwork traps, Temple Fugate felt something snap across his chest. At first it started as a mental pain, it took him a second to recognize the feeling, a feeling of a combination of guilt and jealousy, and then it turned into something else . . . .
A magnetic ache.
A silent weight in his chest.
A certainty, somewhere, impossibly, a son.
He didn't know how he knew.
He only knew that time had taken something from him and placed it somewhere he could not reach.
For the first time in years, Temple missed a scheduled crime.
For the first time in years…
Clock King was late and he hated being late.
11: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick. The Silence Before Destiny
Kairo Fugate Wakati slept peacefully in the west wing of the mansion, cradled in cool, dark velvet and the slight calm of both new and ancient clocks.
Moonlight painted the nursery in gentle silver, casting light on his small form and throwing long shadows which appeared to keep watch beside him.
Each breath he took drew the silence closer, as if the night alone kept its own vigil at his bedside.
He did not cry.
He did not twitch.
Not a single noise came from his lips; even in sleep,
Time moved softly about him like a guardian tide, the air radiating with potential
and maybe the sense that the universe itself waited silently, waiting to see what this child would become.
Dr. Wakati looked on from the shadows, heart hammering with a combination of awe and dread. Already, impossible futures spun through his mind
equations without solutions, destinies without guarantees.
He saw in the child both an assurance and a warning, a living, breathing paradox in the body of a small baby boy which resisted every law he had ever known.
Outside, Gotham's skyline flickered, neon and silhouettes crashing in restless patterns.
Inside, the future ticked quietly into place, each second more burdensome than the last.
And somewhere deep beyond space and second, the universe acknowledged him
—not as a hero, not as a villain, but as a fixed point in a broken timeline, a singularity around which destinies would bend, and histories would splinter.