A lone witch is on her way shopping for parts. As usual, same project, same place, same vendor, different parts. Surely she will manage to make a construct sooner or later. The past has not been kind so far.
As she leaves, a porcelain doll approaches her, cracks all over, with an almost jittering walk. The doll, empty-eyed, clearly drained of a big part of its magic, bumps into the witch, making the freshly bought fabrics scatter on the floor.
The doll apologizes, its voice barely functioning, and tries to clean up the mess it caused. The witch is simply staring, almost in horror at the state it is in.
No witch should ever abandon care for their doll this way, or in any way at all! A crack needs to be fixed, a lack of magic filled, a walk unjittered.
Before the doll even finishes picking up the parts, the witch immobilized it and took it in (yet another sign of carelessness, a witch should not have this be possible for their dolls).
What to do, the witch wonders, or rather, how to do it. Almost every part of this doll is cracked, it’s a miracle it didn’t fall apart ages ago. But should she just replace all the parts? Is it even the same doll?
No, she decides, no doll of Thesseus will be built here, surely, she thinks, surely she can fix it. It will simply take some work.
Slowly, she fills the cracks in, carefully takes the doll apart, first its legs, then its arms, even more carefully its head, she infuses the “glue” with magic, making it almost shine golden. Surely it can’t fall apart now, but this is only an external fix. The core of the doll is still as jittery, as empty, deprived of magic, as broken as before.
But a doll’s core is not simply refilled. It is bound to its witch. She would say “with a heavy heart”, (but that would be a lie,) she replaced the old core with a new one. Freshly made, especially for it, catered exactly to its body, its mind alone. Giving it back to the former owners would be torture, no doll deserves to be treated like this!
As it opens its eyes, freed from the week long immobilization, it recognizes its new owner as such. Its old core discarded, a blank slate, it still does recognize the state it is in. The cracks, while filled, glow bright, making it clear it has been broken before. But not by her. She could never. It knew that.
Even with this new core, the doll seems unwell. It takes care of the witch’s dwelling quite well, even without being asked to, yet any time it makes any mistake, forgets a single corner or almost breaks a single thing, it is waiting for punishment. From its witch? Why would it do that? Even it didn’t know. It was just ingrained into every part of its body. But the punishment never came. It needed to learn that.
The witch, still working on her own construct, conversed with her doll a lot. More than it ever expected to be talked to. About the most benign things. Why would she do that?
She was building a relationship.
Months pass, the doll learns about its witch, the witch about her doll. What it means to be either. What it feels like to be either.
They do feel very alike. Sympathetic.
Very sympathetic, even.
To the point where the witch realizes, she did not buy the parts for her project. It bought them for itself.
And it became, through many, sometimes failed, spells, a soft plushy.
And the plushie’s doll slowly realized, the golden glow on its body is not a glow of being broken. It is the glow of being fixed.
