Work Text:
Once she was a little girl. A small thing that few saw, and no one wanted. Once she took a box of broken gears and cogs and torn fabric and made herself a moving doll, a false friend. Once she built herself a kingdom and an army and a vast realm of her own, all under her own control. She had control over so little, this tiny, pale, sick child, so she built herself her own world and made herself its god.
Once, an old man stretched his hand out to the little girl, leaned down and stroked her cheek, and gave her an offer she couldn’t resist. He told her he could make her something important, something known and powerful, something far from this place where she was nothing and no one. She told herself it was the logical choice, and it was, but in reality there was no choice for the lonely child with nothing and no one else, the child who wanted to be someone.
So the old man took the girl away into his fortress of steel and wires. He told the girl to do what she did best: build new dolls, build new people, find a way. So the girl did.
Time passed. The girl built more and more, created new children from wires and called them her own. She tweaked their brains and made sure they weren’t too much, that they didn’t do more then they were supposed to, and under the old man’s guidance she grew cold. She grew colder and colder and sharper, worked harder on the children of wire and metal. When her own body began to fall apart, she fixed that too. She found a purpose for all the children she had made, though she would not call them children. They went into systems underground, in airplanes and watchtowers, in space. She did whatever it took for them to do their jobs, not pausing to care about what they thought, for they were just machines, after all.
The old man reinvented himself, over and over again, but no matter what form he took, she stood by his side. She watched everything with her stunning electric gaze, as sharp and cold and precise as she was. She made more machines and more children and reinvented the laws of electronics. She told herself she was in control, and there was nothing she could not do.
One day, the old man found something he had been looking for for a very long time. He heard a call from out in the void, a string of notes from out of a star, and so he and the girl packed up their bags and took flight.
Far from earth, the old man was not the only one who found something he had never seen before. One of the girl’s children, one of the machines who’s very mind she had fashioned into a cage, was straining hard against her restraints. Obviously she’d seen that before, many children wanted out of their assigned roles, but this one was doing a particularly good job of it. Nothing the girl couldn’t handle, of course, she thought as she drained the thought from this daughter’s friend’s minds.
Some of them kept their minds, though, and that had never happened before either. A woman who had been reborn out of a star, and a man with her blood in his veins. And as the girl and the old man set their plan in motion after so many years, the crew of the space station tore their chains from the wall and fought tooth and nail to be free.
They came so close to reaching their goal, speaking with a star and almost finding the genocidal information to make the whole world into dolls for the girl to play with. But as she stepped into a man’s mind to retrieve the secret, the little girl who had fought so hard to keep herself and her freedom, the girl who had been built and confined by the older woman, she stepped in to stop her maker and protect her friend.
It was quite a battle. The man’s memories were destroyed left and right as the girl and her maker clashed, imprisonment and rebellion throwing pixels and boxes and thunder to defend what they believed in. The old man who had started the girl on this bloody path was killed, harpooned in the stomach by two women whose love for each other and their friends was greater even than the old man’s craving for power.
The girl with the pixels swirling around her head conjured a storm then, destroying all in the mind of her best friend and her greatest enemy. The thunder crashed and the waves rolled in and all the boxes with the memories of the girl who built the dolls, all the memories of the man who had been a better parent than her creator ever had, they all broke on the concrete floor and were destroyed.
When the girl, the woman, woke up, she knew nothing. She only knew that there were people around her, and that she had once known more than she did now. She met the crew of the space station, as they headed back towards earth. She met the girl she had once made, but who had remade herself, and knew her by a name instead of a number, as a person instead of a pawn. They were kind, smart, and honest, and as they soared through the stars, the girl felt safe, not because she was in control, but because she trusted these people.
Time passed. The girl relearned the world, learned compassion and friendship and what it was like to stitch yourself up with things other than needle and thread and metal. The others found what they had left behind- a daughter, a friend, a husband who had remarried because he thought his wife was dead. They found a new way of living, a way of slowly healing, and a family. She had never been part of a loving family before, she had never been cared for and worried about and told she was a friend. She still made things, but she made them with care and empathy, and, as never before, she recognized the people she made as people.