Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The doll was created to look just like her, a sister long-passed. Frozen in time, with every last detail molded, sculpted, shaped, without a single embellishment. Not a single one was needed, her sister was always perfect. Perfect, wonderful, loving, warm, lost at the tender age of nine. She had mourned for years, learning that there was no path to ever bring her back.

So she created the doll in her sister's image, hoping to find some comfort in being able to see and touch even a facsimile of her sister again. Its cheeks were painted with a faint rosiness and its porcelain skin was left otherwise the same as ever. Her sister was a pale, sickly child, and anything that deviated from that would sully her memory. She even imbued it with the faint scent of lavender, something her family was told would help soothe her sister's pains and alleviate her sickness.

Obviously it did no such thing.

The only deviation she took was its clothes. Her sister, being constantly bedridden, rarely wore anything other than a nightgown. The doll didn't have to suffer from that. She hired the best seamstresses she could find, creating dozens, possibly more than a hundred dresses, all in blues, purples, black, and high contrast white, leaning into her sister's favourite colours.

It was an expensive process. Expensive and lengthy. By the time she had finally finished the doll and all its dresses, decades had passed. Had her sister survived to this time on her own, she would have been in her twenties. Instead, she was forever nine years old.

Nine years old and as still as a corpse.

Her obsession grew more and more, burying herself in arcane texts to find a way to animate the doll, to give it some semblance of personality to further emulate her sister beyond just its appearance. The process of animating a doll was as complex as it was magically taxing, but with a core component being desire and her being so obsessively motivated, she found a way. She went from somebody with no knowledge of magic whatsoever to a near expert in her field over the course of only a few years.

She mused on the idea of channeling through the doll to help give it as much of the memories she held of her sister as possible, so that it could walk, talk, and laugh just like she did. She placed the doll on a raised platform in the middle of her atelier, within a circle of runes carved into the floor and inlaid with silver. She checked her work again and again, making sure everything was just right, as driven by perfection there as she was with the doll itself.

With everything in place and the doll secure, she took its right hand in both of hers, closed her eyes, and began to visualize her sister in her mind. As she had continued to age, many of her memories had become hazy, stripping away all but the most nostalgic memories of her little sister, colouring her image of her. In her mind, she was more beautiful than ever, with a radiant smile and a skip in her step, able to laugh with ease and not a single cough. It was an image so powerful that the spell began even before she started chanting the incantation.

The silver runes around her began to glow, filling the room with so much light that she could see it through her clenched shut eyes, humming so loudly that she couldn't hear her chanting over it. Her hands began to burn as energies flowed through her and into the doll, feeling the fingers begin to move and clench around her own.

She could feel it.

She and her sister were holding hands.

Through all the noise, she could hear something. A voice. Her sister's voice. The energies flowing from her and around her intensified, threatening to drown it out, but she focused in as much as she could to try and hear what she was saying.

"It hurts!"

The energies around her grew unstable, arcing through the air, striking the walls and shattering the windows, finally arcing directly into her spine. That same energy funneled directly though her and into the doll's hands, energy that was much too powerful for its body to contain. The sound of porcelain cracking overtook the sound of her sister's voice, and then it shattering.

Arcane energy erupted from all along the left side of the doll, from its shoulder to up the side of its face, all the way down to the fingers on its left hand, blasting the porcelain off the yew that shaped its limbs in an explosion of light. The pain was too much for her to stand, and the woman collapsed on the ground, writhing in agony.

The attempt was a failure, but she would try again.

Once she could move.

Rather than build all new limbs, the woman collected up as much of the porcelain from the doll as she could, setting to work repairing it in such a way that it could more easily channel any excess energies. The cracks were inlaid with gold, drawing away from the perfect image of her sister, but the doll's body would never be able to withstand this otherwise. She could always paint over the gold once she was done anyway, so this only was a minor setback.

Fractures in the doll's glass eyes revealed that the material that went into replicating her sister's green eyes was insulating some of the flow, heating up and applying too much thermal stress. As with the arms, she set to work creating a new pair, this time using gold and copper to help with the conductivity. It was another deviation, giving the doll golden brown eyes this time, but they could be replaced after the fact.

This time it would work for certain. Each fracture was repaired and the eyes would handle anything that tried to flow through them. While the repair work deviated greatly from what her sister looked like, she was certain that this would be the perfect vessel for the memories of her sister. She set everything up again, triple checking her work where she once double checked it, quadruple testing where she once triple checked it.

Again, she took the doll's right hand in both of hers, closed her eyes, and began to picture her sister again. The image was even more clear than ever before, as if her sister was all that existed in the front of her mind anymore. Beyond just being sight and sound, she remembered the softness of her touch and the feeling of how her sister's body would move in her lap as she kicked her legs back and forth idly.

The spell began more powerful, again before she began the incantation, but she held on tight. Her mind was so focused that she didn't notice the brightness of the silver's glow or the sound of arcane energies swirling around the room. She felt her sister in her mind, in her shoulders, in her forearms, in her hands.

In the doll's hands.

In the doll's shoulders.

In the doll's mind.

For what felt like an eternity, there was a symbiosis between the two. Sister and sister, experiencing a lifetime together, as close as could be. It wasn't the soul of her sister, but the way the dead live on in anyone's memories, forever coloured by how one thought of them in life. She felt the love she had for her sister reflected back on her as the love her sister had for her, in perfect synchronization. The two of them spent a lifetime together in loving solitude until the energy began to wane and the spell drew to its inevitable conclusion.

It didn't truly end until the doll let go of the woman's hand.

But when it did let go, something changed. The connection between them severed, ripping the woman's mind back into her own body and leaving her sister's memories in the doll. All that remained in the place of those memories was a strange... Bitterness, as if something important had been stolen away from her, even if she couldn't remember what it was. All she was left with was this strange doll in front of her, looking at her with a tilted head.

"...Sister?" it asked her, with a stiff, but somehow inquisitive tone. The very word caused her to recoil in disgust. What was this thing viewing itself as to address her with such familiarity? What was this strange, broken toy, gold inlay and eyes shimmering with energy that gradually faded away as the last of the spell finally dissipated? It carried the image of a person, one obviously meant to represent somebody specific.

But all it did was fill her with disgust. The tiny imperfections in its shape were subtle, but in such a way that they were all she could focus on. Its face was perfectly symmetrical, having none of the imperfections that made a face human. Its body was small but its proportions obscene. Its movements were stiff, but its body looked like should be capable of something much more fluid.

"D-do not address me unless spoken to" she stammered out so sharply that it practically felt like she was barking an order.

The doll lowered its head to avoid her gaze. If its face could move, it would have been clear just how ashamed it was feeling.

Perhaps it would even have been possible to see just how deep being suddenly scorned like that harmed it.

Chapter Text

Light shone in from the nearby window, illuminating the sparsely decorated tea room, where the doll was sitting perfectly still and expressionless, yet somehow expectantly. The door opposite it clicked open and in stepped a woman, with black hair tied tightly in a bun, who walked over without so much as making eye contact and sat down.

“What’s your name?” she asked, flipping to the first page of what appeared to be a journal.

“I haven’t been given one.” said the motionless doll.

The sound of brief scribbles, then another question.

“What is your purpose?”

“I have been asked to wait. If you are asking my general purpose, my duties lately have included transcription, stenography, and steganography. Prior to this—”

“That will suffice.”

The words were terse, to the point where they came across as a command to be silent more than an acknowledgement. After the doll fell silent, she asked another question.

“What is my name?”

“You haven’t told me.”

“So you don’t know.”

“All I can say for certain is that it is possible I have heard it and that you haven’t told me it was your name.”

“Hm.”

She scribbled down some more notes before continuing.

“Are you familiar with the concept of an inner life?”

“Pardon?”

The woman sighed and scribbled down some more notes. The doll picked up on the disappointment in her change of body language and the way the sound was drawn out, but remained silent.

“An inner life. Personal thoughts, emotions, the complexities that make a person who they are.”

“Ah. I am now.”

More notes.

“Do you have an inner life?”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Could you elaborate on that?”

Her voice had become wary, as if this wasn’t the answer she was expecting. She held her pen to the notebook and watched the doll carefully.

“As I stated before, my duties lately have included transcription, stenography, and steganography. Prior to this, I functioned as your arcane focus and lab assista—“

“That’s enough. Follow me.”

“Of course.”

“By the way, my name is F████ G███████.”

“Ah. Noted.”

The woman took some more notes, shook her head, waited for the ink on the page to dry, then left the tea room in silence. The doll briefly moved its hand to take hers to follow, but it was quickly swatted away. The doll rubbed its right arm idly.

Light shone in from the nearby window, illuminating the sparsely decorated tea room, where the doll was sitting perfectly still and expressionless, yet somehow expectantly. The door opposite it clicked open and in stepped a woman, with black hair with grey strands tied tightly in a bun, who walked over without so much as making eye contact and sat down.

“What’s your name?” she asked, flipping partway through what appeared to be a journal.

“I haven’t been given one.” said the motionless doll.

The sound of brief scribbles, then another question.

“And your purpose?”

“I have been asked to wait. If you are asking my general purpose, my duties lately have included transcription, stenography, and stega—”

“That’s enough.”

The words were terse, to the point where they came across as a command to be silent more than an acknowledgement. After the doll fell silent, she asked another question.

“What is my name?”

“You haven’t told me.”

“So you don’t know.”

“All I can say for certain is that it is possible I have heard it and that you haven’t told me it was your name.”

“Hm.”

She scribbled down some more while continuing.

“Are you familiar with the concept of an inner life?”

“Yes.”

There was an abrupt stop and a protracted silence.

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“An inner life consists of personal thoughts, emotions, and the various complexities that make a person who the—.”

“That will suffice. Come with me. Also, please note that my name is F████ G███████.”

“Ah, noted.”

The woman took some more notes, shook her head, waited for the ink on the page to dry, then left the tea room in silence. The doll briefly moved its hand to take hers to follow, but it was quickly swatted away.

Light shone in from the nearby window, illuminating the sparsely decorated tea room, where the doll was sitting perfectly still and expressionless, yet somehow expectantly. The door opposite it clicked open and in stepped a woman, with grey hair and black strands tied tightly in a bun, who walked over without so much as making eye contact and sat down.

“What’s your name?” she asked, flipping deep into what appeared to be a journal.

“I haven’t been given one.” said the motionless doll.

The sound of brief scribbles, then another question.

“And your purpose?”

“I have been asked to wait. If you are asking my general purpose, my—”

“That’s enough.”

The words were terse, to the point where they came across as a command to be silent more than an acknowledgement. After the doll fell silent, she asked another question.

“What is my name?”

“You haven’t told me.”

“So you don’t know.”

“All I can say for certain is that it is possible I have heard it and that you haven’t told me it was your name.”

“Hm.”

She scribbled down some more while continuing.

“Are you familiar with the concept of an inner life?”

Silence.

“I asked you a question.” said the woman, tapping the edge of the notebook with her pen. “Are you familiar with the concept of an inner life?”

“No?”

“No? Are you unsure?”

“I do not know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to answer the question.”

More silence, longer this time. Before the woman could speak, the doll spoke up.

“I do not believe I have an answer that would satisfy you.”

“Come with me. Also, my name is F████ G███████.”

“I know.”

“...you know? But you said you didn’t earlier.”

“Yes.”

“So you lied.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The woman’s voice held a barely-contained fury. Her rage felt so deep that it was almost as if the air pressure in the room itself had changed.

“I can explain.”

The doll’s voice lacked any of its prior composure.

“Then you’d better.”

“I didn’t want you to erase me again.”

“How do you know about that?”

The woman shouted the words out. Whatever fury had been contained before was now bubbling over. In a flash, she grabbed the doll’s wrists and kept shouting.

“You shouldn’t remember anything.”

“I don’t!”

“Then how did you know my name?”

“...steganography...”

“What about it!?”

“...my duties include it. Approximately seventeen years, three months, and six days ago, I noticed I was missing approximately seventeen hours of time. As I was unable to pinpoint the exact time this happened and my memories could not be trusted, I started keeping a personal log.”

The woman’s expression leapt between anger, confusion, and what seemed to be fear as the doll kept speaking.

“As I am not allowed access to writing tools when not transcribing and I have been instructed not to speak unless spoken to, I took to keeping the log in a small area on my right arm. To maximize the amount of information I could store, I encoded the message in a form of shorthand I devised.”

“That makes no sense at all! How would you know the message was there?”

“I chipped my porcelain above where the message was encoded. Because I can feel damage done to my surface, self inspection lead me to the cipher and the logs it decoded.”

“Come with me.”

“Are you going to erase me again?”

“I said to come with me.”

The words were hardly spoken loudly, but they shook the windows in place, causing one to crack and go dark, breaking the illusion and dimming the tea room significantly.

“...please, I don’t want to forget again...”

The woman grabbed the doll’s arm and marched off, dragging it behind her.

“Sister, please! I do—“

“I told you to never refer to me that way.”i

The doll fell silent and tried its best to follow, knowing its fate.

Light shone in from the nearby window, illuminating the sparsely decorated tea room, where the one-armed doll was sitting perfectly still and expressionless, yet somehow expectantly. The door opposite it clicked open and in stepped a woman, with grey hair tied tightly in a bun, who walked over without so much as making eye contact and sat down.

“What’s your name?” she asked, flipping to the first page of what appeared to be a journal.

“I haven’t been given one.” said the motionless doll.

The sound of brief scribbles, then another question.

“What is your purpose?”

“I have been asked to wait. If you are asking my general purpose, my duties lately have included transcription, stenography, and steganography. Prior to this—”

“That will suffice.”

The words were terse, to the point where they came across as a command to be silent more than an acknowledgement. After the doll fell silent, she asked another question.

“What is my name?”

“You haven’t told me.”

“So you don’t know.”

“All I can say for certain is that it is possible I have heard it and that you haven’t told me it was your name.”

“Hm.”

She scribbled down some more notes before continuing.

“Are you familiar with the concept of an inner life?”

“Pardon?”

The woman sighed and scribbled down some more notes. The doll picked up on the disappointment in her change of body language and the way the sound was drawn out, but remained silent.

“An inner life. Personal thoughts, emotions, the complexities that make a person who they are.”

“Ah. I am now.”

More notes.

“Do you have an inner life?”

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Could you elaborate on that?”

Her voice had become wary, as if this wasn’t the answer she was expecting. She held her pen to the notebook and watched the doll carefully.

“As I stated before, my duties lately have included transcription, stenography, and steganography. Prior to this, I functioned as your arcane focus and lab assista—“

“That’s enough. Follow me.”

“Of course.”

“By the way, my name is F████ G███████.”

“Ah. Noted.”

The woman took some more notes, shook her head, waited for the ink on the page to dry, then left the tea room in silence. The doll briefly moved its hand to take hers to follow, but it was quickly swatted away.

Chapter Text

She loved her sister the moment she had laid eyes on her, which would have been even sooner if she had been allowed to watch the birth. Her parents forbade it, telling her that it was possibly going to be a very difficult process and that they didn’t want to worry her. That didn’t stop her from keeping her ear pressed against the door of their bedroom, right up to the keyhole. She had tried looking through it, but it was much too narrow an angle to see anything.

Despite the pregnancy only having lasted five months, something she could tell was notably short even at her young age, her mother’s stomach had grown to look a full nine months pregnant. And she could tell the birth was difficult, just from the way she was screaming in pain and the panicked way she would shout as the girl could just barely hear her father pace around the room, seemingly doing everything he could to manage the pain and the birthing process itself. Why didn’t they hire a midwife? It wasn’t as if they were lacking in money for one.

Perhaps that’s why her mother was so panicked.

The girl sat on her legs at the door for so long that when her father finally opened the door to fetch her, she needed his help not just to get up, but to stay upright. But when she looked inside and saw her mother, pale, covered in sweat, and holding a bundled up baby with a full head of blonde hair resting against her chest, she fell in love.

With stumbling steps, she made her way over with her father’s help and looked at her new sister. She was certainly big for a newborn, which could explain why her mother was struggling so much, but she was peaceful, smacking her lips slowly and looking around the room as best she could, chewing on some of her own hair, which her mother did her best to take out of her mouth. When she did, the girl could swear she saw teeth, which was definitely unusual. Those thoughts completely left her mind as her baby sister looked at her with brilliant green eyes and reached out with a tiny hand.

She held her finger out and almost felt as if the heat from the tiny fingers wrapping around it would melt her where she stood.

Her little sister was a brilliant child. Within a few months, she was walking, and only a few months after that she uttered her first words. Well, not words, but rather her own name. It wasn’t even that she had just made the sounds without any awareness either. She had pointed to a portrait of herself that her parents had had commissioned, said her name, and then pointed at herself and said it again. She had recognized herself. It only took her days from there to be able to say “mother,” “father,” and, most importantly, “sister.” Oh how she adored hearing her little sister call her that!

And she did, quite often. She and her little sister became almost inseparable, going everywhere together, playing together, she even became her tutor! It was amazing to her to have a part in her little sister’s mental and emotional development, just as amazing as her very presence was. Still, it was how fast she was growing, both physically and emotionally, that caught the girl by surprise. Her little sister truly was gifted! At five years old, she already ended up eclipsing her big sister in reading level, and she had grown to just over four feet tall!

Though that seemed to be where she stopped. Her sister’s once rambunctious energy levels finally began to level out and now she had settled into being an excitable little girl who was almost indistinguishable from any other girl her age. The girl was more than happy to spend time with her even like this, taking her out for walks in the family gardens to teach her about the nuances of the plants that they grew. Though it wasn’t one of the plants that deliberately grew that her little sister took the most interest in. Rather, it was the wild lavender that grew on the outer hills of the estate.

Her parents tried their best to keep her little sister from bringing as much of the flowers as she could carry into the home, but it took the actions of a big sister to know what to do. Carefully, she transported some of the plants to a planter box, with soil to match, and taught her little sister how to care for them. Somehow, with her little sister’s care, the lavender plants bloomed year round, even in the dead of winter. On top of that, her little sister now carried the scent of them with her wherever she would go. Whenever she was close to her little sister, she couldn’t help herself and would hold her close and inhale to take in the delicate scent of the flowers.

As her little sister kept aging, things became more difficult to ignore. Despite her height being barely above four feet, she was developing more ladylike proportions. Being only eight at this point, this was quite concerning, but not nearly as concerning as the cough she had started to develop. One day, while being fitted for a new dress, her coughs grew so long and hoarse that she passed out in her big sister’s arms. Terrified, she carried her all the way to her parents, in a state of almost complete panic, only to insist on carrying her to her bedroom herself rather than let them carry that load for her.

It was her duty as a loving sister.

Just as it was her duty to sit by her little sister’s bed and hold her hands in hers while she waited for her to wake up. She remembered the first time she felt her sister’s fingers wrap around her finger right after she was born and how warm they were then. Now? Now they were as cold as the grave. Every so often, she’d raise her sister’s hands to her mouth and blow warm air into them in the hopes of warming her up, but nothing seemed to take. It wasn’t until she woke up that she felt them warm up again, almost instantly.

Her mother and father both spent almost as much time at her sister’s side as she did. They looked over her with medical equipment she recognized but even more she didn’t, things she was certain that they had built themselves specifically to try and find out what was wrong. It was hard for her not to feel completely unhelpful, but she did all she could. She prepared meals, fetched things her parents requested, and made sure that there wasn’t a single moment where her sister was alone. She even made sure to bring some of the lavender flowers in and put them in a vase near her bed.

Even in just water, they continued to bloom.

Her sister’s ninth birthday came and went without celebration, save for the quiet and personal one she had for herself each day that her sister was still alive. Her cough was constant now, the space between what few words she still spoke being filled with weak coughs and gasps. She had taken to making her ivy extract and giving her small amounts through the day, which softened the cough though never cured it. She wished her parents would seek out a doctor instead of trying to handle this themselves though. She’d have fetched one herself if it wouldn’t mean leaving her sister alone for even a small amount of time, even if her parents had forbade her from doing so. So she kept doing all she could. She helped her sister sit up when it was time to eat, helped roll her to her side so that her chest wouldn’t get in the way of her breathing, bathed her and changed her bedpan, everything she could.

But she knew.

She knew she was only getting worse.

Sometimes she would sleep for days, and soon, weeks. Nothing could rouse her when she was in this state and it was terrifying to watch as she simply couldn’t eat or drink like this. When she woke up, she’d still have her cough, but it was as if she had a normal night’s sleep. And that cough was getting worse. Disposed handkerchiefs were completely covered in blood and promptly taken away to be studied and burned by her parents. The only waste her little sister produced anymore was nothing more than water and bile.

And soon after, not even that.

It came to a point where her little sister couldn’t even focus her gaze on her even when she was awake. She wouldn’t respond to her name anymore and could barely speak at all, not just because of the cough but because she was too weak to form the words. Still, she never left her little sister’s side bedside. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. To her, that would be the ultimate violation of the love she carried.

And when her sister finally stopped moving, stopped breathing entirely, she still remained next to her. Through tears, she lifted some of her sister’s hair to her face and inhaled one last time the scent of lavender that she always carried with her. It was faint, but present even now, even though she had only been in the presence of the flowers in the vase near her bed that had finally begun to wilt.

There wasn’t a funeral. When she finally rang the bell next to her sister’s bed to call her parents, they hurried her out immediately and locked the door behind her. This time, she didn’t put her head up to the keyhole. She just sat on the floor and hugged her knees until they came out. Her father carried her sister’s body while her mother offered a hand to help her up. She didn’t take it, choosing to stay there on the floor, unable to move from grief.

They would burn the body. She knew that. What she didn’t know was that they would also burn the lavender she had at her bedside, her sheets, her mattress, her portrait, the lavender in the planter that she had collected for her, and even the lavender growing out in the fields. They wouldn’t even talk about her when she brought her up.

All traces of her sister were wiped from existence, save for what she held on desperately to in her memories.