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In theory, what you are is not Romeo Morelli, not the Lucignolo that a boy named Carlo loved.
In theory, you should not love him. You are a strange creation of an inventor, a perfect version of the real boy his son loved. A version that father would approve of.
In theory, you are filled with only the best memories of a boy. A boy who got sick and died. A son, and someone's love.
You are a puppet. This you know. You know this well. You are a ponderous automaton. You move, and you think. This is alright.
And you are a puppet, and you are programmed to think.
You do not think that you were intended to think quite so much.
You were supposed to sit as the ghost lamp for an opera and spend nights sitting on a bare stage with a lantern in your lap. You were supposed to be humanoid scenery, a pretty face to enliven ensemble scenes. You were on occasion to act as a spurned suitor, a no-line beau.
But you were not supposed to spend that time… thinking. Not thinking in the way that you did, imagining the boy your creator had brought into the world, the boy he loved desperately, mercilessly.
You were not supposed to spend the hours in the deep silence of a closed theater thinking of his mother's raven hair, his skin made of kaolin, the paintbrush flick of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
You were not supposed to spend those crowd scenes looking for his trim figure like darling Stellina's , to watch him move with grace and gravitas, to hope for a glance from liquid eyes.
You were certainly not supposed to imagine the ingenues whose arms you kissed were instead a young dandy. You were certainly not supposed to imagine a boy described as studious and somber and stunning grinning at you, like a pleased little kitty-cat.
But…
You did. You thought about that young man. You thought on him often. You began not only to think, but to imagine.
You began to imagine what his hand would feel like in yours, as wooden and metallic as it is. How porcelain skin might flush up to shell pink, through to vermilion. How a cheek, shoulder, waist would feel under your hand.
What a slim body might feel like against yours.
You began to imagine fluttering eyelashes, open lips with a peek of tongue behind, the rise and fall of a chest against yours, under your hand.
This was not intended. But it was inevitable, you think, for you not to fall for the boy you were designed to love, designed to adore with every layer of porcelain and join of metal within you.
What was not inevitable was his appearance before you. Within your thoughts, this boy - Carlo - is different from the puppet you hear has arrived, the new pretty doll of Geppetto's hand. This puppet looks like Geppetto's son Carlo, but Carlo is yours , an amalgamation of your thoughts and a once-truth. You laugh at the other puppets who call him the inventor's son - who comment that he is all-doll and all-human. You scoff. You feel a gnawing fear when he begins to down your other comrades.
You feel especially afraid when Geppetto visits you, when he acts as though you hit him when you say you are in love with Carlo, when he tells you that love and hate are separated by a razor wire.
You hate him? No. That couldn't be. To hate him would be to hate your own heart, your own soul.
Maybe you do. And how often is love masqueraded as hate – hate as love?
It confuses you. You hate him? You hate him. No, you love him. What had you been imagining all this time if not loving him? The idea of grabbing that silken hair and having that face contort in pain-
Well. That produces a different feeling in your chest. But its intensity is the same.
Holding him close to run a blade across alabaster skin. Watching rubies well from his wounds.
Maybe you do hate him.
Geppetto finishes his upgrades, a "defensive program", and you feel lighter on your feet, but also more aware, more on-edge. It is easier to believe that you are hated, hunted, watched. He also tells you to retreat within the King of Hearts, the bulky skin you used in street performances, the very stage a character. He clanks alive and rends you within it, at his heart as a thousand performances had necessitated before.
But when the doll of your beloved - your detested! - is there… when he is before you, in what you know is the real Romeo Morelli's clothing-
Where you had imagined ink, his curls are pitch. Where you had imagined alabaster, his skin is ivory. Where you had imagined bluebird's plumes, his eyes are the uncompromising blue of high noon's sky.
And where you had imagined an ingenue's playful smile is instead a beast's snarl.
His eyes are wild with rage. He does not listen to the King of Hearts' words, the requests to join the rest of the puppets, to call off this frightful violence. When the big man asks, offering a hand down to the comparatively small boy, Carlo smacks the hand away, instead leaping forward to stab deeply at where you reside.
Oh shit.
You love-hate this boy. You do. You feel your heart pounding in your chest as the blade retracts from beside you, having narrowly missed your side. The King of Hearts leaps away, a sudden protectiveness of you, the actor, inside.
The King pulls away, leaping with its agile arms, arms which danced high above crowds and amongst little scattering children, effortlessly careful. The larger arms come down as an earthquake, terrible and prompt, rattling even you inside.
You have some control, but the King of Hearts has his own ideas as well, able to act independently of you, to let an actor within his stage truly act without worrying about hecklers or disruptors. The fans on his back to keep actors from fainting in the muggy summers of Krat kick on, whipping the frail puppet up into the air-
Until he falls with devastating accuracy to land atop the King, cutting the joint of the puppet’s shoulder.
Of course you can understand the King, the patois of languages shared by puppetkind, as he pleads with Carlo on your behalf, a jolly old man. But with the absolute look of nonrecognition in his eyes, you suspect Carlo doesn’t speak it, has no ear for it. Still, the King goes on, teasing you: Come now piccolino, join your friend Romeo, you two know each other, don’t you?
You blush, despite yourself. Even as you pull the King’s arms away from blizzard flurries of hits, you still watch the form of Carlo dance around the orchestra of the theatre. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the slim form of your detested flits around the King’s ankles, cutting mercilessly at the joints of his legs and shocking the both of you through the metal.
The King falls, jarring the both of you. Carlo is clipped, and your blood boils when he comes away, dazed and holding his shoulder. And yet the spirit-flame of his gaze never diminishes as he watches the King slump, chuckling sadly, I suppose the show is over…
The hatch opens, falling away from its hinges, the final slump having broken it along the frame. Your arms and legs are still caught within their controls, no time before the King powered down to remove them. You begin to feel heat building within the stage’s core-
Something explodes. You are engulfed in a blaze, but yet you weather it, some of your niceties sloughing away under the heat, some of the wax used to make you look more like the real Romeo. It burns your meager shirt away. It burns some of your hair away.
It does not, however, burn in quite the way Carlo’s gaze does, when you step free from the now-destroyed body of the King.
You open your mouth.
He stares at you, expression one you daren’t name. It is something you wager only a human would truly understand. And even then, maybe not all humans.
You, a puppet, do not know it.
As his nose begins to bleed, he snuffles it back, pressing the heel of his flesh-hand to it, still staring at you.
And you think to say something.
“Carlo… it’s me, Carlo. Don’t you want to- come with me?”
You step forward. He stares at you. If you were to wager a guess… horror dawns on his face. He does not speak, but he burns a hole into your soul, lips falling open at your words.
Dragging the scythe behind you, you extend your own hand.
“Your father… said I hate you. But- I don’t think I do… I… We… I knew you.”
Carlo shakes his head.
“I was yours. Romeo, remember?”
Carlo shakes his head, swallowing. The line of his throat under the real you’s neckerchief entices you. If you seized it-
“It’s Romeo-”
Carlo raises the rapier to your chest, pointing it at your heart.
He shakes his head, firmly, once. No. You aren’t Romeo.
You leap at each other in an instant, steel clashing on steel.
You feel it, in your feet. You feel it in the way the two of you move together, in the motions you choose – this is not how Romeo fought, if the real Romeo fought.
This is how Carlo fought.
You are hyper-agile, hyper-quick. Despite your slightly larger frame, you are able to sail through the air, like watching a kestrel descend on prey much smaller than itself. You find it easy to heft yourself on the pole of your scythe and leverage the blade down over Carlo’s head. And you find it easy to dodge those flourishes of blade.
“Carlo - your father’s trying to turn you against us. He thinks you’re-”
Stubborn. Willful. Starting to become difficult.
He furrows his brow, lashing a wild attack at you. You manage to avoid the brunt of it, but by no means are you unharmed by it - you stagger, falling away from him and into one of the chairs littered about the orchestra.
"We're his puppets ," you spit. You feel almost perversely fast- sprinting to his side to position your unburnt eye and ear towards the barrage of attacks coming your way, the only way you can manage to keep up.
And yet, this Carlo has something else within him, because this Carlo flings a bottle into your chest, the thing shattering against you and burning . You're already burning, but this is acid- acid eating away at the vitreous coating on your skin, burning-
You can't possibly slow. If you slow down even a second, it's over. You'll die. And then- and then?
You hate this boy. So why do you want- need to tell him more? To explain yourself. To point out what he does not yet know-
"Your father is the King of Puppets, Carlo, he's lying to you and to me, he told me I hated you-"
He feints, dodging over to your ruined left side and striking your waist. It shouldn't hurt. You're not supposed to hurt! You're a goddamned puppet!
He hooks you with the harpoon on his wrist, pulling you close, and himself in the air-
You stare up at him. In the flame-light of the theatre, he is haloed on the edges, lithe frame poised in the air like an avenging angel, Marian-blue eyes lit like lanterns and staring you down.
"Carlo!" You shout as he descends upon you, plunging his sword into your hip while he lands, agile as a cat, on you.
You scramble away, rolling away, dislodging his blade through the fragile joint of your leg, anything to prolong this- this confrontation with the boy you hate, you despise-
He is right there, alcohol flame burning behind his eyes, intense, intense, intense.
It dawns on you. The sunlight of your affection rises, terrible and true, over the horizon of every lie Geppetto had told you, the malevolence in each word, to abandon and dissuade and destroy his son-
It dawns on you as you dance with him, sword clashing against scythe, as you dodge a flurry of attacks seemingly without end, as you avoid Eros’ arrow attached to your love’s wrist-
He is inches from you, now. Blue eyes burning like midday. A doll’s face contorted into such - such a human expression, all the grief and anger and violence of a human.
He is beautiful. Terribly, horribly beautiful.
He is precious. Singular.
You are his.
“Carlo, I love y-”
And then his rapier is buried in your heart.
You choke. The sudden flow of oil into your mouth stops you. Stops everything. Everything stops.
You’re dying.
Perhaps that is the worse thing, to be a ponderous automaton in this moment. To think about death. To think about nothing.
And yet you find even now, your thoughts wander to Carlo, about everything that will follow, must follow-
You have to warn him.
But nothing comes out.
Nothing but oil, welling over your lips. Bitter.
And when were you able to taste? When were you able to feel this bitterness, this pain?
It must have been when you fell in love.
It must have been when you took comfort in the image of Carlo, in imagining he was yours, and you were his.
You want to apologize. For you, for your existence. What grief it must cause him. You aren’t actually Romeo, you know that. If the man is alive, what a blessing it would be, but still it was not guaranteed that that Romeo would love a puppet like you. For his father who does nothing but despise him despite how wondrous he is. For the world.
You stare down at him.
He is beautiful. You do not have to wonder any longer, or imagine. You can reach out your hand to his and feel his skin under the porcelain of your fingertips, enjoy the color of blood under his pale skin, can wrap an arm around a warm waist and slump, uneasily, against a body that would catch you.
Loving someone was edged always with this poison, this bitterness – of knowing one day it would all end.
You slump against his shoulder, and then, when you can muster the energy no longer, you fall to the floor and shatter into dust.