fly by vs tick away

fly by

verb
  • Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see fly, by. 

  • To pass or go past quickly, often without much interaction 

tick away

verb
  • To count down to zero (i.e. signaling the end (or start) of something). 

How often have the words fly by and tick away occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )