Work Text:
Please Don’t Take My Sunshine Away
* * *
Poppy gives you the phone before you go deeper into Playcare.
She holds it out with both small hands — carefully, with the particular reverence of someone who has been keeping something safe for a long time and is choosing, deliberately, to trust you with it. It's a toy phone. Bright and cheerful and completely at odds with everything surrounding it, the kind of thing that belongs in a child's bedroom and not in whatever Playcare has become.
He talks to me through this, she says. Ollie. He's been guiding me for years. He'll help you.
You take it carefully.
He knows this place better than anyone.
You don't ask how a voice in a toy phone knows Playcare better than anyone. You've been in this factory long enough to have stopped asking certain questions. You put the phone in your pocket and keep moving.
* * *
The voice comes through later, in the deeper sections, when the dark presses in from all sides and the path forward isn't immediately clear.
It's warm.
That's the first thing — unexpectedly, disarmingly warm, in a building that has made a specialty of being the opposite. Patient and guiding, the voice of someone who knows where the danger is and genuinely wants you to avoid it. Left at the junction. Past the collapsed ceiling. Through the door that needs the blue hand.
You follow the directions.
And then there's a pause in the static and the voice says something small — just a reassurance, nothing significant — and the specific way it says it stops you mid-step.
You know that cadence.
The weight of it. The way it drops at the end of a sentence, like letting something go.
You stand very still and your mind goes somewhere it hasn't been in a very long time — a boy, fifteen years old, a rooftop, August, the particular quality of a voice that belonged to someone who had decided you were worth talking to and never once made you feel like that decision was conditional.
No, says the rational part of your brain. He'd be forty-five. This voice is young. This is a toy, probably, like Poppy. Or an echo. This building is full of things that used to be other things.
It just sounds like him.
It just happens to sound exactly like him.
You shake your head.
You let him guide you through the rest of it — the warmth of the voice through the static, patient and steady — and you don't think about him, and you don't think about rooftops, and you almost convince yourself that the ache in your chest is just the factory pressing in and nothing more personal than that.
Almost.
* * *
It happens in Shelf Ventilation Block B6.
Poppy is gone before the explosion — a panic attack taking her somewhere you couldn't follow fast enough, leaving you and Kissy alone in the ventilation block in the particular way that alone feels different when something is coming and you both know it.
The explosion doesn't announce itself.
It just arrives.
The force of it throws everything sideways and you reach for something — anything — and what you find is Kissy's hand, her enormous pink fingers closing around yours with everything she has, and for a moment you think it's going to hold, you think she's got you—
Her right arm comes off.
The sound of it and the sudden absence of the grip and then you are falling, and Kissy is above you getting smaller, and the factory swallows the distance between you with its usual indifference.
You hit the bottom alone.
* * *
You lie there for a moment in the dark and the ringing in your ears, and you think about the voice through the phone.
Warm. Patient.
Ollie.
The Prototype did this.
You put the voice next to the explosion. The warmth next to the destruction. And you arrive, slowly, at the only conclusion that makes any kind of sense.
He found him. Wherever Ollie was — whatever corner of this factory he'd been surviving in — the Prototype found him. And now—
Your hands are shaking.
You make them stop.
Later. You can fall apart later. Right now, move.
You move.
* * *
Later comes in fragments, the way it always does — as the melody that has lived in you since 1975, surfacing without permission in the spaces between running and surviving and refusing to stop.
You are my sunshine. My only sunshine.
You shove it back down.
You keep moving.
* * *
The wall comes apart like it was never a wall to begin with.
You are in Lily Lovebraids' chair with her braids wrapped around your waist, alongside Poppy and Kissy, all three of you sitting with the particular stillness of people conserving energy for when it matters. Lily has been performing for an hour and you've been watching the wall and waiting.
The hands come through first.
Needle-tipped. Enormous. Tearing the wall apart with the casual efficiency of something that has never once needed to ask permission from a structure.
Through the gap he comes.
He fills the room the way weather fills a sky — completely, and with the implication that it was always going to. The jester's hat. The fixed smile. The amber optic sweeping the space with the focused indifference of something reading its territory.
Your brain does several things at once.
The first is fear. Automatic. Reasonable. The second is grief — he found him, he killed him — sharpening into something present and immediate because the thing responsible is standing ten feet from you right now.
The third thing—
The third thing is the way he moves through the room.
The specific, unhurried, already-decided quality of it. The way of someone who made up their mind before entering a room and doesn't feel the need to announce it.
A boy used to move like that.
A boy on a rooftop, fifteen years old, crossing to sit beside you with the same quality — as if the destination had never been in question, as if there was nowhere else he was ever going to end up.
No, says the rational part of your brain. But quieter than before. Much quieter.
He reaches Poppy. The layered voice arrives — scientists, staff, people who are gone, all threaded together into something that is its own entirely distinct thing — and underneath it, buried so deep you would miss it if you weren't already listening, a cadence. The specific weight of certain words. The ghost of a voice that came through a toy phone in Playcare, and underneath that, further back, the original it was made from.
The same voice.
The chair is the only thing keeping you upright.
The braids are the only thing keeping you still.
You look at him — at the fixed smile and the amber optic and thirty years of transformation layered over something you used to know better than almost anything — and you look for the boy who wanted to be free and see the world.
You find him.
Buried deep. Built over. Translated into something nearly unrecognizable.
Nearly.
Not completely.
Never completely.
The amber optic sweeps the room and lands on you and holds — half a second, maybe less — and something in it adjusts. A recalibration. Something about you isn't fitting whatever picture it expected, and you watch it reach for something almost familiar.
Finding it.
The amber optic moves on to Poppy.
You sit in Lily's chair and breathe, because breathing is the only thing currently available to you that doesn't require your hands, and you think—
It's you.
Ollie—
Is it you?
The suspicion plants itself like a splinter. Sharp. Specific. Not a certainty — not yet — but present in a way it wasn't an hour ago. Present in a way you cannot dismiss the way you dismissed the phone, because the phone was just a voice and this is the voice and the mannerisms and the way of moving through a room and the amber light reaching for something almost familiar—
You make me happy, the melody hums, helpless and quiet, when skies are grey.
* * *
You escape Lily's dining room.
The suspicion comes with you.
* * *
You find the cassette tape alone.
It's tucked behind a panel in the wall of a small room you reach after a puzzle — one of those brief moments of relative quiet the factory occasionally produces between its worse things. You almost walk past it.
You don't.
The player is old but functional, which is more than can be said for most things in this building. You sit on the floor in the factory's usual emergency red and press play.
Elliot Ludwig's voice comes through first.
You recognize it from the recordings scattered through the building — the founder's voice, careful and measured, carrying the particular quality of someone who has decided that what they're doing is necessary and has built an entire architecture of justification around that decision to keep from looking at it directly.
And then—
Oliver.
The cassette player is very small in your hands.
You listen.
You listen to all of it — to Elliot's careful paternal reasoning, the way he speaks about what he's doing as if it is something he is giving rather than taking, as if the boy on the other end of this conversation has any meaningful say in what is about to happen to him. And you listen to the other voice respond.
Oliver's voice. Young and uncertain and 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 listen to the whole thing.
When it ends the room is very quiet.
You sit with the cassette player in your hands and you think about the tea party. The way he moved through the wall. The buried cadence. The amber optic holding on your face.
You think about the toy phone. The warmth of it. Poppy holding it out with both hands — he talks to me through this, he's been guiding me for years.
You think about Shelf Ventilation Block B6. The explosion. The conclusion you arrived at in the wreckage — he found him, the Prototype killed him—
And then you think about Elliot's voice on the tape saying Oliver like a gift he was giving instead of a life he was taking, and everything rearranges itself at once. All the wrong conclusions falling away. The right one arriving in their place with the particular quality of a truth that has been waiting a very long time to be found.
He didn't disappear.
He was taken.
By the man who was supposed to protect him.
And what that man made from him has been in this building the whole time — guiding Poppy through a toy phone in the dark, moving through corridors with the unmistakable quality of someone who had already decided where he was going, looking at you in every room with an amber optic that reached for something almost familiar and found it and didn't know what to do with the finding.
The voice through the phone was him.
The amber light in Lily's dining room was him.
The thing in Shelf Ventilation Block B6 was him.
Is him.
Has always been him.
You'll never know, dear, the melody hums, soft and devastating, how much I love you.
You sit on the floor for a long time.
Then you get up, because this factory does not give you the option of staying on the floor indefinitely, and you go find the others.
* * *
They don't believe you.
You tell them carefully and completely — the tea party, the mannerisms, the voice underneath the voices, the cassette tape, Elliot's voice, the name — and you watch their faces and you can see the moment each of them decides it's too much.
Poppy is the hardest.
Poppy has been talking to Ollie through that phone for years — holding onto him as something safe and guiding and entirely separate from the thing she's been trying to defeat — and asking her to collapse those two things into one is asking her to lose something she cannot afford to lose right now.
"That's not—" she starts. Stops. "Ollie wouldn't—"
"I know what it sounds like," you say.
"The Prototype is not Ollie," she says, with the flat certainty of someone closing a door.
You don't push.
You know what it is to need to not know something for a while.
You carry it alone and keep moving and tell yourself that after — when it's done — there will be time to sit with all of it properly.
You tell yourself there will be time.
* * *
The door to the chamber is heavy and Giblet gets it open and you step through and—
He is already looking at you.
Of course he is.
Poppy is behind him in the glass cage, her hands pressed flat against the surface, her painted eyes finding yours with relief and fear in equal measure. Behind you, Giblet settles into position. Harley's screen casts its pale glow across from you. Chum breathes his enormous steady breath at your left shoulder.
None of it is what you're looking at.
The amber optic is on your face.
It has been since the moment the door opened. And you know — with the cassette tape in your pocket and Elliot's voice still living in your ears and thirty years of assembled evidence finally making sense — that it recognizes you. Not as a threat. Not as a variable. As you. Specifically and personally and with the weight of a history that predates this chamber and this building and everything that happened in it.
The amber optic that used to belong to a boy who looked at you sideways on a particular line.
The silence in the chamber is the kind that happens when two things that have been on a collision course for thirty years finally arrive at the same point.
You think about the toy phone, warm through the static.
You think about Elliot's voice saying Oliver like a benediction over something he was in the process of destroying.
You think about okay said in a voice that meant more than okay, on a rooftop, under stars, in a world that still felt like something you were going to get to weigh in on.
You take a step forward.
His face clicks. Once. The amber optic sharpens.
You take another.
I know, you think, with everything you have, aimed at the amber light. I heard your voice in Playcare and I thought you were somewhere alive. I thought the Prototype killed you and I grieved for you in a factory corridor like I should have grieved thirty years ago. And then Lily's dining room — the way you moved, the voice underneath the voice — and then the tape. I heard what Elliot did to you. I heard him say your name like you were something he could own.
I know what they did to you.
I came back anyway.
I came back because of the children and because of Poppy and because leaving felt like one more thing left unsaid and I have so many of those already—
Something moves at the far edge of the chamber.
Two somethings.
Huggy and Kissy come through the side entrance with the focused, battered energy of things that have been through a great deal and have decided it isn't finished yet. Kissy's missing arm. Huggy's uneven gait. Both of them bearing the marks of everything this factory has done to them and moving forward anyway, because forward is the only direction any of you have left.
The chamber stops being still.
* * *
What follows is loud and desperate and costly in ways that won't finish being counted for a long time.
Giblet takes a hit that sends him hard into the wall. Chum absorbs damage that would have ended anyone smaller and keeps going with the indestructibility of something that has decided this matters and is not open to reconsidering. Harley screams coordinates from his screen with the furious energy of a man who has been waiting ten years to be useful and intends to make every second count. Huggy moves through the chaos with the relentlessness of something that has already survived the worst this factory could do and is not impressed by the rest of it. Kissy fights with one arm and the particular fury of someone who knows exactly what was taken from her.
And you —
You move through it the way you've always moved through the things this factory puts in your way. Not gracefully. Not fearlessly. Not without cost. Just continuously. One decision and then the next. The stubborn unglamorous refusal to stop that has gotten you through everything this building has ever done to you.
You think, in the fractured way that happens when survival is using all of you — you think about where you learned this particular stubbornness.
Not from a manual. Not from training. From a boy who showed up every day in a place that gave him very little reason to. Who paid attention when no one required it. Who made room on a shelf without being asked and in doing that one small quiet thing showed you what it looked like to choose to be present even when present was hard.
You learned the best of your stubbornness from him.
You use it now.
The Negation Compound hits.
The chamber shudders.
The amber light dims.
* * *
Poppy's glass cage opens.
She falls into your arms and you hold her and she's shaking and so are you and neither of you says anything for a long time because some things don't need words and some things don't have them and this is both.
Over her shoulder you look at what's left of him.
Diminished. Quieted. The poppy gel complicates finality — he's not gone, the amber optic still burns low and slow, the fixed smile still fixed. The bells finally, completely, heartbreakingly still.
He's looking at you.
Even now. Even like this. The amber optic on your face with the same focused attention it has given you across every room and corridor and moment it has ever had the chance.
The chamber is very quiet.
Giblet is on the floor, breathing. Chum stands over him. Harley has gone uncharacteristically silent on his screen. Huggy crouches near the far wall, watching. Kissy stands very still, her one remaining arm at her side, looking at him with an expression that contains thirty years of things that don't have names.
You reach into your pocket.
You take out the cassette tape.
You hold it up — open-palmed, unhurried. The way you'd hold out something you needed someone to see. The way you'd say I know. I found this. I know what he did to you and I know who you are underneath all of it and I came back anyway.
The amber optic drops to the cassette tape.
Holds there.
Comes back up to your face.
Something in it shifts — something that has no business still being there after everything, something that should have been dismantled along with everything else — and the stillness that follows is not the stillness of something that hasn't registered. It is the stillness of something that has registered everything and is holding very carefully still because of it.
Poppy makes a sound.
She's seen the tape. She knows what it is. You feel the moment it lands on her — the moment the door she closed when you tried to tell her swings open whether she wants it to or not, because some truths don't wait for you to be ready for them.
She looks at the tape.
She looks at him.
She looks at the amber optic that is looking at you and has always, always looked at you, and you watch her arrive at the same place you arrived at on the floor of that small room — slowly, and then all at once, and with the specific quality of something irreversible.
"Ollie?" she says.
Very quietly.
The amber optic moves from you to Poppy.
Holds there for one long, devastating second — the fixed smile and the still bells and whatever lives inside the amber light looking at the girl who has been talking to him through a toy phone for years without knowing it was him. And him looking back at the girl he's known since Playcare and has been guiding through the dark without ever being able to say why.
Then back to you.
You don't decide to hum.
It comes out the way it always comes out — without permission, from somewhere deeper than decisions. Four notes, soft and unsteady in the wrecked chamber. The beginning of a song that belonged to a rooftop and a voice that cracked on the high notes and kept going anyway.
The amber optic goes completely still.
Something in it shifts — the reaching quality you recognize from thirty years of watching it, the almost familiar becoming fully familiar. He knows the song.
He knew it first.
You keep humming, because stopping feels like the last in a long series of abandonments and you are so tired of abandoning things. The melody moves through the space between you, carrying what thirty years of unsaid things have needed saying.
The amber light dims.
Slowly.
The way a candle dims when there's no more air — not extinguished, not gone, but low and far away and going somewhere you can't follow. Receding behind the fixed smile and the still bells and everything that happened between the rooftop and this chamber, all of it beyond the point where a melody can get to it.
The hum dies in your throat.
The chamber holds the silence of it.
Poppy's hand finds yours and holds on. She makes a small broken sound — one you've never heard from her before, the sound of someone losing and recognizing and grieving all at once. Behind you, Kissy makes a sound too — low and quiet, the sound of someone who has been carrying something for a very long time and has just been given permission to put it down.
Huggy goes very still.
Giblet says nothing.
Harley says nothing either.
Please don't take my sunshine away
the melody finishes, silently, in the part of you that has been singing it since 1975 and will probably be singing it long after everything else has gone quiet.
Too late, says the part of you that knows.
Way too late.
* * *
You sit on the steps outside the factory in the cold morning.
The others filter out behind you, one by one, in the way of people who have been through something that needs air and space to be properly understood. Giblet sits on the bottom step and says nothing. Chum settles nearby with the quiet solidity of something that doesn't know how to offer comfort in words and has decided presence will have to do. Harley's screen glows from somewhere behind you, also silent.
Huggy and Kissy find a space near the wall — close enough to be part of it, far enough to have their own version of it. Kissy's one remaining arm is wrapped around herself. Huggy's enormous hand rests near her shoulder. Both of them looking at the morning with the particular quality of things that have survived longer than they were supposed to and are still figuring out what that means.
Poppy sits beside you.
She doesn't say anything.
You don't say anything either.
You sit together with the cold and the pale morning and the weight of what just happened, and the sky is grey and ordinary and going nowhere in particular, and the world is continuing at its usual pace, indifferent to cassette tapes and toy phones and rooftops and the world that a boy never got to see.
You think about the voice through the phone. Warm and patient. Guiding you through the dark of Playcare — and guiding Poppy for years before that — without either of you knowing it was him. Watching over both of you through a toy phone in the dark, in the only way that was left to him.
You think about the tape. Elliot's voice. Oliver. Said like a gift. Said like ownership. And you wonder, sitting on the steps, whether Ollie ever understood what was happening to him, or whether by the time he did it was already too late to be anything other than what they'd made him.
You think about the amber optic when it looked at Poppy.
One long, devastating second.
He knew her. Had always known her. Had been guiding her and protecting her and never once been able to say why, and she'd never known it was him, and he'd never told her, and you wonder whether that was a choice or a wound or whether there's even a difference anymore after thirty years.
You wonder the same thing about yourself.
You make me happy, the melody hums, quiet and uninvited, when skies are grey.
The grey sky begins to lighten.
Not dramatically. Just the sun making its usual decision, burning through the grey with the patient certainty of something that has been doing this since long before any of this and intends to keep doing it long after.
The world keeps going.
It always keeps going.
Poppy's hand finds yours in the space between you on the step. Her fingers are small and cold and holding on with the particular grip of someone who has lost something and is making sure of what remains.
You hold on back.
You close your eyes and let the sun be warm on your face and you breathe, and you think about a boy who wanted to see the world and never got the chance, and you think about his voice, and you think about the sideways glance, and you let all of it be true at once — the grief and the love and the thirty years of carrying both, and the morning, and the warmth, and the melody that refuses to leave no matter how many windows you close against it.
You'll never know, dear.
The sun is out.
It's warm.
Somewhere behind you, very quietly, Kissy makes a soft sound — not a cry, not quite, but something in that family. Something that belongs to a creature who has spent thirty years in the dark and is feeling the sun for the first time in a long time and doesn't quite have words for what that is.
Huggy settles closer to her.
Giblet looks at his hands.
Harley says nothing, which means more than anything he could say.
How much I loved you.
The melody plays to no one in particular.
To the morning. To the factory. To the amber light that has finally, after thirty years, gone still.
Please don't take my sunshine away.
He's already gone.
He's been gone.
You just didn't know it until now.
— ✦ —
End