Work Text:
Almost Familiar
A Poppy Playtime One Shot
Experiment 1006 | The Prototype / Reader
— ✦ —
You remember the exact shade of the sky the last day you saw him.
It was that particular blue that only exists in late September, the kind that looks painted rather than real, too vivid and too clean to belong to an ordinary Tuesday. You were sitting on the roof of the orphanage with Oliver, your legs dangling over the edge in the way that would have gotten you both in serious trouble if any of the staff had looked up at the right moment. Neither of you cared. You were fifteen and the sky was that blue and Oliver was laughing at something you'd said, tipping his head back, and you remember thinking — with the specific clarity of a thought that doesn't know yet that it's a last thought — I want to remember this.
You didn't know you were actually going to have to.
He was gone three days later. No note. No explanation. Just the empty bed across the hall and the staff who looked at the floor when you asked and the particular quality of absence that sits differently in a room than ordinary emptiness does.
You asked for months. You got nothing back.
Eventually you stopped asking and started carrying it instead, the way you carry things that don't have answers — quietly, and in the part of yourself that you don't show people.
* * *
Playtime Co. hired you in 1981.
Playcare, specifically — the wing of the company that was supposed to be about the children, about care and warmth and giving the orphans who came through their doors something that resembled a childhood. You took the job because you believed in that, or wanted to believe in it, or needed somewhere to put all the years of practice you'd had at caring for children who didn't have anyone else.
You were good at it. You learned the names quickly, learned which ones needed patience and which ones needed noise and which ones needed you to simply sit beside them without saying anything at all. You brought them small things — a picture book, a paper crane, something to hold onto in the dark. You showed up every day and you made sure they knew someone saw them, and at night you went home and sat in your kitchen and didn't think about Oliver.
You were very practiced at not thinking about Oliver.
* * *
You saw the Prototype for the first time in 1987.
The staff spoke about him in the careful, oblique way of people who have been told not to discuss something and have decided the safest approach is to discuss it as little as possible. You knew there was something in the lower levels. You knew the children were sometimes brought somewhere and never came back. You knew there were parts of this building you didn't have clearance for and had learned, over six years of working here, not to ask about.
You were coming back from the late rounds when he moved through the corridor at the far end of the east wing.
You froze.
He was enormous — that was the first thing, and the most immediate. Enormous and mechanical and organic at once, metal and flesh woven together in ways that shouldn't have worked, moving with the fluid many-legged motion of something that had been redesigned from the ground up around a different set of principles than the ones you were used to. The jester's hat. The fixed smile. The single amber optic that swept the corridor with the efficiency of something that had already catalogued everything in it before you'd had time to notice you were being looked at.
That optic passed over you.
Held for a half second.
Moved on.
Your heart was very loud in the corridor for a long time after he was gone.
You told yourself it was fear. It was an entirely reasonable thing to be afraid of. You didn't examine why, underneath the fear, there was something else — something that felt uncomfortably like recognition, like the specific ache of a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come.
You filed it away and went back to work.
You were good at filing things away.
* * *
The Hour of Joy happened.
You'd been in the east wing when it started — the sounds coming first, distant and wrong, the kind of sounds that a building shouldn't make and that your brain spent several valuable seconds trying to explain away before the screaming started and explanation became irrelevant.
You didn't make it out.
What you did make it to was a room in the lower levels you'd never been in before, chasing a route that turned out to be a dead end. You never saw it clearly — just the light going strange and the smell of something chemical and sweet, and then a long, soft nothing that lasted what felt like forever and was actually about six hours, and then—
* * *
Then you were this.
You don't have a mirror but you have the reflection of the observation window across from where you've been placed, and what the observation window shows you is a doll. Porcelain face, painted features, a tutu that was probably white once and is now the color of old cream. Wings — actual wings, articulated and feathered, spreading from your shoulder blades in a way that would have delighted the children if you'd ever been able to show them. A ballerina angel. Someone had a vision.
You can move. You can think. You can feel the cold of the floor through the soles of your satin shoes and the weight of the wings when you shift your shoulders and the very specific and particular grief of someone who has had time to sit with the thing that has happened to them and understand it fully.
You've had a lot of time.
The factory is quiet now in the way that places are quiet after something terrible has finished happening — not peaceful, just emptied. Whatever is left down here moves through it the way survivors move through wreckage, carefully and with one eye always on the exits.
* * *
You find the files on the nineteenth day.
Not all at once — the factory doesn't give you things all at once. It gives them to you the way it gives everything: in pieces, scattered across corridors and broken rooms and the kinds of places that suggest someone once worked very hard to make sure certain information stayed buried.
The first thing is a tape. Old, the casing cracked, found in a cabinet in one of the lower lab rooms you'd been cautiously mapping out in the weeks since the Hour of Joy. You find a working player two rooms down, which feels less like luck and more like the factory making a point, and you sit on the floor and press play and listen to Elliot Ludwig's voice fill the room with the particular quality of someone who has decided what they're doing is necessary and has long since stopped examining that decision too closely.
He uses a name.
A name you know.
You sit with the player in your hands for a long time after it ends.
The second thing is a ledger — Preston's handwriting, cramped and careful, filling the margins of an orientation document with notes that were clearly never meant to be read by anyone else. You'd worked alongside Preston long enough to recognize his shorthand, the particular way he abbreviated things when he was writing quickly and didn't want anyone looking over his shoulder to understand what they were reading. It takes you the better part of an afternoon to decode it fully.
What it says, when decoded, is the kind of thing that recontextualizes every other thing.
The third thing is a cassette — a conversation between two people, one of whom you recognize immediately and one of whom you almost don't. The second voice is young. Uncertain. Trying, in the way of someone who has learned that trying is what's expected of them, to find the shape of what's being asked before deciding whether they can give it.
You've heard that voice before.
You heard it every day for three years on a rooftop in the seventies.
You sit on the floor of the lower lab with the cassette player going quiet in your hands and the weight of thirty years settling around you like dust, and you think about the corridor in 1987 and the half second the amber optic held, and you think about the thing that has been living in this building for thirty years that the staff spoke about in careful oblique terms, and you think about a boy who disappeared in 1975 with no note and no explanation and no answer that was ever given to you no matter how many times you asked.
You arrive at the only conclusion the evidence has ever actually pointed to.
You sit with it for a long time.
Then you fold the pages of Preston's notes back into the orientation document, tuck the tapes into the pocket of what used to be your jacket and is now somehow still with you in whatever form this body allows for pockets, and you keep going.
What else is there to do.
* * *
The question you keep returning to is not the one you'd expected.
It's not what did they do to you — though that one lives in you too, sits in the center of everything else like a stone you keep finding no matter how you rearrange the rest of it. It's not when did it start or did he know what was happening.
The question is simpler than that.
Is he still in there.
You think about the boy on the roof, fifteen years old and laughing at the sky, and you think about the thing that moved through the east wing corridor with the fixed smile and the amber optic and the many mechanical legs, and you try to draw a line between them. Some days you can almost see it. Most days you can't. You don't know which is worse — believing he's still in there somewhere, or believing that whoever Oliver was got used up in the process of making whatever the Prototype is now.
Both of them have their own particular kind of pain.
You've gotten familiar with both.
* * *
He finds you on the forty-third day.
Or you find him — in a factory this size with this quality of silence, who is finding whom is mostly a matter of perspective. What happens is that you round a corner on one of your careful satin-soft explorations of the lower levels and he is simply there, at the end of the hall, the amber optic already oriented toward you with the focused efficiency of something that doesn't need to look up because it already knows what's there.
You stop.
He doesn't move.
You stand in the corridor and look at him and he looks at you and the factory settles around you both with its usual indifferent groaning and for a long moment nothing happens at all.
Then you take one step toward him.
His face clicks. Once. Twice.
You watch the amber optic move over you — over the porcelain face and the painted features and the cream-colored tutu and the wings folded small at your back — with the thoroughness of something reading a document it has encountered before, going back over certain lines twice.
Something in it stills.
Not the stillness of something that has stopped. The stillness of something that has found what it was looking for and doesn't know what to do with the finding.
It is not recognition — not the clean, certain kind that comes with a name attached. It is something older and less legible than that. The particular quality of attention that belongs to something that has encountered a thing it almost knows and cannot place, cannot source, cannot explain, and is holding very still because of it.
Almost familiar.
Not quite.
Ollie, you think, and can't say. Ollie, it's me.
He looks at you for a long time.
The fixed smile gives nothing away. The amber optic gives away more than it probably intends to — something in it that you've spent forty-three days learning to read, the small adjustments it makes when something registers, the particular quality of attention it carries when something is being processed rather than simply observed.
It's processing now.
You watch it happen. Watch him look at you — at the doll's face that was your face, at the wings that were not supposed to be yours, at the porcelain smile that is and is not your smile — and you watch something move through the amber light. Not arrival. Not recognition. Something more like the shadow of a thing that used to exist, passing briefly over the surface of something that has become so thoroughly other that the shadow can't find anywhere to land.
One second.
Two.
The amber optic goes very still and very quiet.
Then he turns and walks away down the corridor, the clink of his metal legs against the concrete floor steady and measured and completely, deliberately unhurried. The bells on his hat chime once with the motion. The factory swallows him back into its shadows the way it swallows everything — completely, and without acknowledgment.
* * *
You stand in the corridor for a long time after he's gone.
The factory settles around you. Water drips somewhere in the walls. The emergency lighting casts everything in red.
You take a breath and let it out slowly.
You think about the tape in your pocket. Elliot's voice. The name said like an ordinary thing, like the name of something owned. You think about Preston's careful cramped handwriting in the margins of a document that was never supposed to tell the truth, and the truth it told anyway. You think about the cassette and the young uncertain voice trying to find the shape of what was being asked, and the thirty years between that voice and the one that just walked away from you without knowing why it almost stopped.
Almost familiar.
Not quite.
That is the thing you will carry with you from this corridor — not the grief, which you've been carrying longer than almost anything, not even the answer to the question you've been asking. What you'll carry is almost. The half second the amber optic held, today and in 1987 and presumably in every corridor between then and now, reaching for something it can't name and can't find and can't stop reaching for.
He doesn't know.
He doesn't know you. He doesn’t remember the roof or the September sky or the laugh that was too loud for the space it was in. He doesn't know that someone spent twenty years asking a question and another decade carrying the answer and is standing right here, in this corridor, in this wrong body, close enough to touch.
He doesn't know nor remember any of it.
And you can't tell him.
You fold your wings a little tighter and start the long walk back.
— ✦ —
End