percyverance

they’re lesbians your honor

🌙 they/them 🌙 val/percy 🌙 21🌙 lesbian 🌙

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The Plain Doll: A Character Study

🌙 675 words. TW for body horror, misogyny, trauma, abuse, neglect, death & violence 🌙

The Doll is grateful she cannot remember being birthed. Only being squeezed, stifled — too tight — into the dark chasm that became her vessel.

All is silent in the dream.

It is always silent in the dream.

The Doll is used to it by now. It is all she has known, for as long as she can remember.

For as long as she has existed.

The Doll was not born. Not really.

For this, she is grateful.

Even if it means she recalls that feeling of disembodiment, of being stitched together, uttered into being word by incomprehensible word, consciousness secreted, oozed from the gaping maw of the one called The Moon Presence, and left behind in this body.

The Doll is grateful, because at least she cannot remember being put together.

Piece by piece. Body molded. Joints fastened. Face sculpted, painted, and glazed, by the hand of another, to please him. Material bent to his will. Every detail carved and fashioned to take the shape of his fantasy.

The Doll is grateful she cannot remember being birthed. Only being forced, squeezed, stifled, too tight, into the dark chasm of this vessel.

The Doll has since learned a little of this body. It belongs to a “woman”. This is because of the clothes she was given. A bonnet and a skirt were the clothes of a woman.

She heard a woman’s name once. Long, long ago. Her maker spoke it reverently, maniacally, and looked at her. Maria.

The Doll had blinked back. She was to be polite. Good manners mattered to her.

“Hello,” she’d said, “who are you?”

Something in her maker’s eyes died, then.

And so, she learned to act as a woman.

The Doll learned that it was a woman’s job to be “loving”. She did not know what that meant. The Doll tried asking her maker, once. He only laughed, hollowly, bitterly, and shook his head. Coughed. The Doll went to boil the kettle then, and did not ask again.

Countless have since arrived to the dream, and she has since learned what love is. They have told her of the gods; of the church and of their love. To love is to worship. To serve your makers. To obey. To be owned. Possessed. To love is to get on one’s knees and pray to them, serve them, fulfill their wishes and bid them good tidings as they leave.

To love is to be a woman.

To love is to be a doll.

She has seen many masters come and go. She has seen their blood smear the lilies as their heads roll into the valley. Her maker has had a great many love him. Most left the dream on their knees. Left her, on her knees. The Doll would send them to off. To face the dawn. And they would go.

They did not say goodbye — but she does not fault them. They are human. They are her makers. Her gods. And she is a doll. It would be absurd. The sun does not revolve around the Earth. The Earth does not revolve around the moon.

Of course she loves them.

So the Doll would kneel for them. Etch their name upon the weathered grave. Rise once more, and return to the silence of the dream.

Alone.

The Doll has known from the moment that pale, sickly sludge of her being had fallen from Flora’s jaws that there was some great capacity hewn into the fabric of her existence. It ached, burned, clawed at the walls of her porcelain vessel. Even now, she can feel it. Writhing in her chest cavity. Eating itself.

She felt that hunger when she looked upon them. When they would take her hand as if it were their own. When they would use her. When they would force her to her knees. When they would look into her eyes just to see their own reflection. When they would cut into the vessel and spill her essence upon the lilies; as if in rehearsal for their inevitable fate.

Of course, The Doll need not wonder the name for this writhing, roiling, churning thing within her; never resting, never sated nor soothed, neverending, eternally desperate for something that this abandoned simulacrum has never known, never known how to express —

Of course.

It is love.

The Plain Doll: A Character Study

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