Chapter Text
Tick
Tock
Tick
Tock
“Rabbit, what are you doing?”
The unfinished copper automaton looked up from her seat in front of the old grandfather clock. “Why does it do that?”
Peter got an odd look on his face. Rabbit was starting to recognize this look as the “I don’t want to answer questions” look, but Iris had banished him from the lab for a few days since he’d fallen asleep over the silver bot he’d been working on again.
“Does what, Rabbit?”
“Make that noise. Make the… thing swing. The little…” She didn’t know the word for it. “The little sticks spin. Why?”
“You’re asking why the clock works?”
“Maybe. What’s a clock?”
A small sigh and he sat down next to her. He didn’t want to deal with the bot’s incessant questions today, but really - it was his fault for not programming the knowledge so Rabbit would wake up with it, and the bot was basically a toddler - what else could he expect? At least Rabbit didn’t make too many messes…. Alone. Who knew what would happen when there was another.
“A clock helps us keep time, so we know how much time has passed and what time it is.”
“What’s time?”
… Oh dear. He didn’t expect to get into answering questions like this today.
“Time is…. It’s a way of measuring the distance between an event that happened in the past, an event happening now, or an event that will happen in the future.” He glanced at the robot, who was quietly watching him with a somewhat blank expression. Whether that meant the bot didn’t understand, or just that there was rarely a thought running through that gleaming metal head, Peter wasn’t sure.
“There are different ways of measuring time. Humans generally use seconds, minutes, and hours for shorter time periods, then days, weeks, months, and years for longer time periods. For example, lunch was about 40 minutes. Ago.”
A slow, ticking whirr came from the clockwork bot. Peter had come to realize that this meant that Rabbit was mulling something over, trying to think about it.
“So what does that have to do with the clock?”
With a soft groan, Peter stood up. He was only 32, but his knees were feeling the hours spent in his lab and moving around large, heavy pieces of metal.
“This clock tells us time in seconds, minutes, and hours. The pendulum swings for every second. After sixty seconds have passed, that makes the minute hand - this one -” He pointed to said hand - “Turn forward one space. As the minute hand turns, so does the hour hand, this one. Once sixty minutes have passed, the hour hand should have moved forward by one hour space. The big numbers here tell you which hour it is - see, it’s 1:47, because the hour hand is still in the one’s hour space, and the minute hand is in the forty-seventh minute space.” He turned to see if Rabbit looked like this made sense. The ticking whirr was louder, and there was steam slowly venting from the bot’s ears and cheek vents.
“How does it do that?” Was the next question. Peter held back a sigh of relief at not having more complex questions to answer. This part was just mechanics, much easier.
“A lot of gears - it’s actually a bit similar to how your finer motor skills work. I’ll find a clock that I can open up and show you soon, okay?”
Eager nods and Peter smiled. Maybe this ban from the lab wouldn’t be too difficult. At least Rabbit was willing to learn, even if the questions were grating.
….
Peter was about ready to force Rabbit to shut down.
When he’d opened up a smaller clock, Rabbit had been enamored, marveling at all the moving parts. Then wanted to get some hands-on time, taking the clock apart and trying to put it back together again. This would be fine, except, as stated before, Rabbit was little more than a toddler. This meant that gears ended up getting eaten, dropped, and deformed. Already, Peter had had to open the bot up ten different times to fish gears out of the boiler or oil tank before either could get damaged. Rabbit was awful at helping to find lost gears, far too prone to distraction, and the broken gears were a lost cause - the bot had no sense of the strength held in those metal arms.
Once he’d finally manage to drag Rabbit away from the clock, he thought things would be okay. He’d distract the bot with some toy, and it would be fine, right?
Wrong. Now Rabbit wanted to know how everything worked. Including the ducks at the pond. Great.
At least the damned robot could read a clock now, so Peter could just say when to come back down to the lab to shut down for the night, instead of going to chase the bot down to be shooed away. Unfortunately, this led to negotiations of “Five more minutes?” and other typical attempts to get out of bedtime.
He was definitely programming the next bot to be more grown up and mature. He could not handle two metal adult-sized toddlers.
Eventually, when fetching Rabbit to go down to the lab, he found the bot back in front of the big grandfather clock. With the other clock that had finally been put back together.
“Why aren’t they the same?” The question came before Peter could say anything. “Shouldn’t they say the same time? How do you know which one’s right?”
“Well, I know the big clock is right because I check it every day to make sure. The smaller clock is probably at a different time because, when we took it apart, it stopped keeping track. Similar to how you shut down at night, and power back up during the day.”
Rabbit didn’t say that she often powered back up while it was still nighttime and dark, and only shut back down when she heard Pappy coming back down so he could watch the power up sequence.
“So when it started again, it thought it was a different time to when it actually was?”
“Exactly.”
Pappy seemed pleased that she’d come to the conclusion on her own. That was nice.
She poked carefully at the hands of the smaller clock. She was really trying not to break them. “Can it go the other way? Keep track backwards?”
“That’s not how the gears work, Rabbit. They’re one direction.”
“What if they were two direction gears, though? Would that work then?”
Pappy sighed. Maybe she should stop asking questions for today…
“I don’t know, Rabbit. I haven’t tried that before.”
She was tempted to ask if that could be the next thing they tried. What came out instead was,
“What about stopping? Do clocks ever just… stop?”
“Sometimes they do, if they’re not maintained properly.”
A small hesitation. That ticking whirr was back. Clearly, there was something on Rabbit’s mind.
“Will I stop? You said that I’m built like a clock. If clocks can stop, could I?”
Well. That wasn’t what he’d expected.
“I’ll do my best to keep that from happening. It means that we need to make sure all your pieces are in tip-top shape, all the time. That means more maintenance, and less eating things that aren’t oil or water, got it?”
A begrudging nod. Peter knew that agreement wouldn’t last.
“Well, speaking of making sure you’re in good shape, it’s time for you to shut down. So come on, let’s get that clock put away and then it’s down to the lab with you, got it?”
Surprisingly, there was no protests from the copper bot, just more attempts to make the minute hand on the small clock go backwards.