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Kissy made her way slowly through the haunted halls of Home Sweet Home. She was forced to walk in a stoop, contorting her lanky form beneath the ornate ceiling (when she’d been human, she’d barely been of a height with the bannister, she remembered that much).
Through darkened, abandoned halls she trod, lumbering carefully around dried pools of blood and long-still corpses, absently following the claw marks in the walls with her own yellow mitts.
Finally, she came to her goal. This was her old room, right? The one with the squeaky bed and the cracked lamp? Yes, she was sure- there was pink acrylic fur, her fur, on the dusty bedspread. She’d been here before, at the very least. And she had to trust that her past self remembered more than she did now. (If she couldn’t trust that… what was left?)
The picture on the bedside table was turned down, to protect its occupant from the dust that settled over Home Sweet Home like a blanket, like snow or ash seeking to bury everything for good. (Snow- had she ever seen real snow, outside of the books they read in class?)
Most of the other pictures in this place had faded with time, colors distorted and bleached and glossed paper warped from exposure, the faces within slowly losing their humanity. But she’d done her best to shelter this one, and it was all she could do.
Kissy carefully picked up the picture, settling her lanky frame on the small bed like she knew she had so many times before, and just stared at the picture between her felt mitted hands. Wondering, trying to remember.
Was this her? She thought it was, given the picture was in her room, though there was always the chance it was a sibling or friend. She had to hope it was her (because otherwise there was nothing left).
She’d had brown hair once, she thought she remembered- frizzy and long, and she’d used to finger comb it flat whenever she was nervous. The girl in the faded picture had freckles and a gap-toothed smile, so Kissy supposed she must’ve had those, too.
Her frozen smile itched, the needle-sharp teeth beneath it- the girl certainly hadn’t had teeth this sharp, those had been given to her by the scientists. She didn’t like showing her teeth, didn’t like remembering that they were weapons, so different from the dull ones in the picture. She couldn’t remember what it felt like, to have human teeth that could chew, that weren’t just meant to pierce, to hurt. What it felt like to have her smile not be a threat.
There were lots of things she couldn’t remember about being a human- skin, for one, skin without plush fur, skin with freckles like constellations. Fingers- real fingers, that could separate and hold things, that could draw and write. Nails- she missed having fingernails, could remember that she’d liked painting them once.
She could remember swings, the swooping sensation of kicking off the ground to fly for just a moment. A vest, something brown, embroidered patches that had made pride glow inside her. The feel of a shag carpet under her fingers, the way she’d enjoyed the plush texture, balling hands in it to ease that restless itching in her skin.
She couldn’t remember her name- had lost that years ago. Without the ability to speak, to write… there was only so much her own memory could hang onto, and most of her life as a human had slipped through her useless hands like red smoke. (At least Doey knew who he was- all three of him. For all the various parts of him fought each other, at least they remembered.)
She’d tried to hang onto the names of the others, instead- Lizzy, Abby, Katherine, Riley, Zack, the list seemed neverending of all those who hadn’t made it, who made up the overflowing graveyard of Playtime, who remained as nothing more than the ghosts who haunted dusty photographs and floorboards (all that was left of them, that was all that was left). No one outside could remember them, and Kissy didn’t want them to disappear entirely, so she had to do her best.
There wasn’t much to do, in a haunted toy factory, so she spent hours trying to remember, pulling up images in her head that she was never sure were real or something dreamed up to take the place of what should be there, like how one of her friends used to tell stories she’d later find out were the plots of movies he’d seen.
Had Zack loved soccer, or did she just remember his cleats and fill in the blanks? Had Abby really worn that polka-dotted headband Kissy pictured her nearly-faceless smile framed by, or had she made that up and just attached it to her friend’s memory? Still, a fiction tangential to reality was better than nothing (and there was nothing left).
She’d lay out on the false-grass lawn, stare up at the twinkling lights that were supposed to be stars- hadn’t Miss Delight once mentioned the skydome was made to mimic real constellations?
Not that Kissy could tell if that was the truth- she hadn’t seen the real sky in so long, maybe ever. And anyway, the sky had started to fall only a year or so ago, the panels warping and peeling from their frames, exposing the red rock above. The stars flickering and dying over her head.
Sunlight, wind, birdsong… They’d all been mimicked in Playcare, facades at normalcy painstakingly replicated for the orphans, to bring the real world into their bubble underground. But the UV-mimicking lights had broken long ago, leaving Playcare in perpetual night, and the breeze had only ever been fans, and the birdsong speakers had faltered and grown tinny, distorted chirping like strange whispers, not so different from when the mini critters’ voiceboxes started failing and they glitched and slurred, before going silent forever.
Those toys didn’t last long in the Safe Haven- the little ones had the unfortunate tendency to go feral once they’d lost the ability to speak (they were younger, they hadn’t been human as long- sometimes they weren’t even full people, hadn’t one of the Cat-Bees told her they had four bodies?). It was part of why she never stayed long, there- she missed Doey and Scout and the others, but seeing the growing memorial, the madness on the walls, the ones that were missing every time she visited, was just too much sometimes.
Kissy preferred roaming, passing like a ghost through the facility that was all she’d known for most (all?) of her life. It was all too familiar to be strange, although she sometimes had trouble remembering when things were familiar from- only years ago, or before That Day, or Before all of it entirely? It all mixed together sometimes.
The other toys never bothered her- Mommy considered her no fun at all and had stopped trying to play with her years ago, and Huggy- well, she wasn’t keen on visiting with him. Catnap let her drift through the halls of Playcare like the ghost she was, his wide grin and glass eyes passing dismissively over her. He knew she was no threat- not since Poppy had disappeared, at least- and tolerated her presence in his sanctuary so long as she moved on before too long.
And she always would- finding quiet refuge in the halls, in the employee lounges and offices, in the tunnels and trams and catwalks of this labyrinthine place. Occupying herself with spinning in the rollie chairs and holding markers between her hands to make a clumsy attempt at drawing and making friends with the spiders that had taken up residence in the humans’ stead. Letting time pass her by unnoticed. Forgotten.
But she always came back to Playcare, eventually. This place had been… home? …comfortable, once, when the children had been here- whether or not she remembered being one of them, she remembered being with them, playing with them and protecting them (she didn’t know where the children went, but she knew they hadn’t been targeted on That Day, hadn’t been in the mounds of corpses left behind, and that was as far as she could let herself think about it).
If she strained hard enough, she could hear voices, still- couldn’t be sure if what she heard was real sound or only the wish of it, the pattern her mind was impressing onto the air, but they were there in the mechanical hum of the factory, giggles and shouts and whispers, half-remembered nothings against the silence. (No screaming, at least- not here. Not anymore). Kissy liked the voices, even if she knew they weren’t real. She could almost pretend this place wasn’t dead.
And then a human came, for the first time in- had it really been ten years? is that what Ollie had said? how old was she now? would she be an adult, if she’d been allowed to grow?- and there was light in Playcare again. A bright blue sky Kissy hadn’t seen in forever.
It was strange, seeing a human in real life, after so long- all she’d seen in a decade was that picture, and the awful, silent decayed corpses of the others. The bones, the drawn husks of faces, all things she avoided looking at on the rare occasions she forced herself to eat. (Sometimes, though- sometimes she would spend hours looking at one of the bodies, the bones, comparing their faces, their limbs, their hands to her own, and trying to remember.)
They were so small, so soft looking, she’d forgotten. She remembered throwing humans, if she let herself think back to That Day, remembered how slight they had been, how easy it was to knock them away, bodies limp and limbs ragdolled awkwardly. Remembered how they didn’t get up again. She tried not to think about That Day.
But Poppy said this human could help them- could end it all, finally. The perpetual hell they’d all been trapped in for so long. If what Poppy said was true and there really were children still alive in the Labs, they had to save them.
It was too late for the toys, far too late for any of them, but the children could still be saved. They could make sure all of this wasn’t for nothing, that they didn’t just fade away forgotten, that the world remembered they were people, once. And that was the important part.