#doll clicks

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

if you find your kittydoll curled up with its hands over its delicate ears, it is advised to move the doll to a more comfortable environment, scruff it into a daze, and force it into gentle cuddles

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

The doll has gotten used to its place on its Witch’s bed.

It is a comfortable spot to be in! It gets cuddled some nights, and on nights it isn’t, it is at least near its Witch. That is, of course, not counting the nights it gets knocked to the floor and forgotten about until morning, staring up at the slats underneath the mattress until the sun begins to shine through the blinds. Sometimes it gets knocked under the bed, and then it takes longer for its Witch to remember, but the doll would never hold it against its Witch.

Its Witch is very busy, and the doll should be grateful for whatever it can get from its Witch.

It pushes away half-suppressed memories of being held carefully against its Witch’s chest and talked at, Its low voice soothing and all of Its attention on Its doll and the doll’s excitable chattering back. Its Witch is busy. Its Witch is busy.

Yes, the doll has gotten used to its place on its Witch’s bed.

It gets to watch It do Its work, and every so often when it is lucky, its Witch will pet it briefly, absent-mindedly as It continues with Its work. The doll isn’t very large, and so the vantage point it receives from resting on the head of the bed favors the doll well.

It gets to watch its Witch play games with Its friends, and talk to Its housemates and if it strains its ears, it can hear its Witch cooking when It goes downstairs, laboring at the stove.

It is…it is content. It is happy. It is content. It is content.

It ignores the growing anxiety lashing at the edges of its Stillness, tearing and chipping and grinding the edges raw and sharp and jagged. It ignores the growing knot inside of its chest cavity, growing and growing until it starts to push against the inorganic walls that protect its delicate heart from the world. It ignores the knot digging further and further into that heart, the rough fibres slicing into the only flesh it possesses and spilling deep red blood into its chest.

It is content, and if it dares to even think otherwise, it would be a bad and ungrateful doll. This doll is good. It must be good. Its Witch only keeps it because it is a good doll. It must be good. It must be content.

The doll begins to notice a change in its Witch’s routine. First in the evening, its Witch goes downstairs and spends hours in the kitchen. The doll cannot hear the clanking of pans or the precise thud of knives against chopping board. But it does hear its Witch talking, and laughing.

The sound yanks the string tighter around its heart, fresh blood welling up and flowing from the cuts. The doll cannot remember the last time it made its Witch laugh.

Its Witch’s tone is soft and gentle, the same tone it hasn’t heard directed towards it in weeks.

…has it been a bad doll? A bad companion? It must have been. A bad doll. A broken doll.

It sits on the bed, fighting to maintain the Stillness that once came to it so easily. Somehow, its chest starts to hitch, a slight movement wracking its frame. It only sends more fear striking down each of its limbs.

Bad. Bad. Bad. Broken.

The doll feels wetness run down its face, but it can’t move to wipe it away. Its Witch isn’t here to do that for it, and it cannot fight the thought that even if its Witch were here, It wouldn’t even notice.

And so it sits there, Still and alone.

Over the next few days, its Witch’s routine changes again. Its Witch spends hours in Its room, almost unaware of Its doll’s presence. The doll stares up at It from the floor, where it had fallen again. Its Witch is scrying, another voice rising muffled from the glass. Its Witch is smiling— laughing and chatting and talking.

It lets the sound of its Witch’s voice wash over it, and tries to pretend it's the recipient instead. It hopes the call will end at some point, and then maybe that its Witch will remember where Its doll lays, fallen by the wayside. Maybe it will at least be lifted onto the bed. Maybe it can at least let itself lean against its Witch’s arm, until the arm is pulled away to gesticulate along with Its speech and the doll topples to the side.

But the scrying goes on, late into the night.

At some point the doll falls asleep, exhausted by the twisting spirals coiling over its body, the iron grip cracking its delicate shell, and the fear the bloody evidence of its hurt will start to spill out of its chest through the growing breaks in its porcelain. The spectre of sleep claims it, and it lets itself lose the tense rigidity of attempted Stillness in favor of the limp laxness of rest.

It wakes on the floor to an empty room.

Its Witch’s voice floats up from downstairs, and it can’t stop the noises falling out of its defective voicebox and the tears spilling from its eyes. But it was trained to be quiet, a training that far precedes its Becoming, and so the noises it makes are near-silent, even in the quiet of the room. The soft whines are a sharp counterpoint to the laughter echoing from the kitchen.

Eventually its Witch comes back into the room. It is already dressed for bed, and so It slips into the sheets and turns off the lights without a look spared at the crumpled doll on the carpet. The doll continues crying in the dark, until it can no longer manage to keep itself awake through its tears.

It stays on the floor all night, cracked and discarded on the ground.

In the morning, its Witch almost trips over its body as It rises from bed.

“Oh, what are you doing down here?” It murmurs, in a tone clearly indicating It is not expecting an answer. It reaches down to pick it up. The doll revels in the feeling of touch, the echo of affection in even such a utilitarian hold. Its Witch’s fingers brush over its key, half-turning it in an abstract, inattentive manner. Still, the feel of its mechanisms twisting uncoils some of the knot, easing the pressure in its chest in miniscule.

The warmth of its Witch’s hands floods its body, and the doll gives into the urge to nuzzle its head ever so slightly against its Witch’s finger. It braces for punishment, but its Witch doesn’t seem to care about its misbehavior.

Oh. It supposes it is past the point of correcting, so deeply flawed its Witch sees no reason to even attempt to fix it. The thought makes its gears start to stutter, jerkily slowing to a stop. Still, its Witch is benevolent and kind and will still keep it nearby, because while even the doll at its best is useless, it is still trying so desperately hard to be good.

The doll is lifted to the bed and it is hopeful and relieved and grateful and— the doll is raised higher, past the bed, and the warm feeling spreading through its body curdles into thick dread.

The doll is set down onto the back of the shelf, dust billowing on either side, disturbed by its small body being pushed across the surface until its back hits the wall. Its legs can’t quite reach the edge of the shelf, one leg outstretched and its foot tilting haphazardly to the side, with the other leg pushed up bent against its chest.

It can barely see over the edge of the shelf— only the top of the door and a few posters on the opposite wall are in its line of sight.

Dolls are supposed to like being on shelves. It is another way this doll is defective, because it fears the loneliness of the shelf, the impersonality of being placed with other dolls— not ones that have Become, like it, but ones bought from stores that were made of plastic and PVC.

Its Witch knows this. The shelf was often a punishment for it, in its early Becoming.

The string around its heart tightens to the point of physical pain, forcing a slight gasp out of its chest. It can feel splinters starting to race along its porcelain, soft crackling noises chasing the splits growing across its body. Beads of red brim at the edges, staining its sepia enamel where the two meet.

The doll had gotten used to its place on its Witch’s bed.

It supposes it simply was not grateful enough.

Days pass in a haze, the doll unseen by all and seeing nothing itself. It watches the door creak open and shut, and it hears cheerful conversation beneath it. It hears the creak of springs as its Witch moves on Its bed, bouncing slightly as It laughs.

The doll attempts to settle into its new routine. It can see the very top of the window, and it watches the sun rise and set through the small slit of glass it can see. It can still hear its Witch. It is where its Witch wants it to be, and so the doll is being good.

The platitudes it tells itself do nothing to stop the inexorable spread of cracks across its surface.

It stays there, alone on the shelf, for what else is it supposed to do?

One night, long past the sunset, the doll is carefully held Still— as it always is. Its Witch is beneath it, on the bed, scrying again. The shelf is dim at best, the blue light of the lamp beneath the shelf cut off by the ledge and casting harsh shadows onto the surface the doll sat on.

It hears a menacing clicking noise to its right, and it slowly shifts its gaze, moving only its eyes. A jet black spider stares back, its eight eyes glistening and light shining cruelly off of its mandibles.

Fear jolts through the doll.

The spider edges closer, one furry leg brushing against the doll’s arm. It starts to crawl up the doll, and it suddenly cannot breathe. In its terror, it pulls on the thread of magic connecting it to its Witch, yanking on its own magical leash in the opposite direction any pulls should go.

It is the best way to get the attention of its Witch, and if it yanks with such power, its Witch has to realise that something is drastically wrong.

Its Witch pauses in Its speech, and the doll waits in building fear. The silence swells, empty except for the rising tension in the air. The spider shifts again, skittering into the doll’s lap.

But then its Witch continues, and cold realisation washes over the doll.

Its Witch cannot feel the pull of a doll on Its magic over the strong steady pull of the magic required to uphold a successful scrying trance.

Its Witch will not come to aid it.

It is alone. It is forgotten.

Its Stillness shatters in a shower of internal sparks, its gears spinning in the wrong direction, tightening the string and tangling it more and the doll, in a blind panic, reaches forward and pushes the spider off of the shelf.

The spider falls, and the doll watches in horror. It turns its gaze to its defective hands, moving without command and acting without Intention.

It scrambles back to its previous position, one leg tucked near it and the other lolling to the side gently, as it was when its Witch arranged it. But now it cannot stop the small twitches of its fingers in boredom or the blinking of its large doe eyes or the pneumatic rise and fall of its chest.

It forces itself to sit still through the night, even as its internal workings are torn to shreds.

In the morning, its Witch wakes and leaves to start Its day. It doesn’t even stop to look at Its doll, perched on the shell engulfed by shame and anguish.

The room is once again empty, except for the doll.

Almost in a trance, it starts to move, its articulated limbs shifting forwards on the shelf.

The shelf is high. High enough that even the small pile of clothing at the bottom of the drop wouldn’t be enough to save it from receiving damage— and that is only if it makes it onto the pile successfully. The floor is farther, and would be much less forgiving on its already damaged porcelain body.

If it made it to the pile, it could try and regroup and— and then what? It would rise to its unpracticed feet, standing unsteadily until it could remember the mechanics of walking long enough to stumble to the door like a newly born fawn.

And…and then it could leave.

The thought alone yanks the ever-present string tighter, new blood beading at the cracks and spilling over, leaving a small pool on the shelf beneath it.

It doubts its Witch would come looking for it. It wouldn’t. There is no reality where the doll would be searched for, or even remembered for long enough to note its absence. The doll has been forgotten among the other collectibles on the shelf, treated as sentient as the figurines to its sides.

But if it fell to the floor, the doll would likely shatter to pieces, an irreparable mess of shards scattered across the thin carpet.

…would that really be so bad? Would that be any worse than a world without its Witch, than a world of a doll playing at personhood again, shedding its porcelain for imperfect flesh and a constantly smiling mask?

The doll edges forward still, its joints creaking and protesting at the movement they have not experienced since the last time the doll received maintenance, an aspect of care so far away in its memory that it barely remembers what it feels like. It leaves a trail of crimson behind it, and it feels guilt burn in its chest ever stronger at the thought of leaving a mess behind it.

It gets close enough to the edge for its legs to dangle off the edge of the shelf, dust spilling into the air and creating a beautiful golden haze where it floats in the light of the midmorning sun.

It locks its gaze beneath it, the distance warping its vision until it can only see the hanging of the air beneath it, large and daunting and impossible. The bed comes into view, warm and soft and entirely out of reach. The doll braces its hands against the edge of the shelf, refocusing its sight downwards.

With naught but a soft scraping noise, the doll pushes itself off the shelf.

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

its Witch has claimed it is “burnt out” and that forcing its key to turn so much on so little might “strip its gears”

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

a doll that’s so little and a key that’s so big that the doll keeps toppling over from the weight of it

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

if this one has to hear itself referred to with the wrong pronouns one more time it will explode and imbed everyone in a ten foot radius with porcelain shrapnel

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

meowmeowmeowmeowmrowwwwwmeowmeow

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

good meowning everykitty!!!!! !!

[dolldollkittydolldoll]

doll that keeps inexplicably waking up with bite marks all over it

surely, its spidergirl roommate has nothing to do with it