the reclusive doll knows far more about repair dollcraft than any other doll you've ever met.
"how did you learn all this?" you ask, pulling an opaque stocking up over a formerly shattered shin. if you look very closely, you might see the cracks, but that's better than you ever managed with just epoxy and your own fingers.
she takes a long sip of the pu-erh you brought her. (hard to get. you couldn't run from loss prevention, so you had to be perfect on the first try.) finally she says, "you really should try this."
it smells better than anything you've had this month, but you're paying her with the stuff, and you don't want to cut into her profits.
"thank you, but this doll drinks greens, mostly."
she shrugs. "your loss. so. i can tell you two stories… up to you what you want to believe."
the reclusive doll continues, "one is about a doll who figured dollcraft out by hard work. she can patch and sand and re-charm you like this, because a hundred other dolls came to her first, and got the best she could do for them then… and maybe a hundred dolls from now, she'll be even better; if you'd broken six months from now, there wouldn't even be a mark, who knows."
you notice that the china cup from which she's sipping tea has a thin crack. you wouldn't have noticed, but one of the roses only has three-quarters of a petal.
"and the other?"
"perhaps," she says, "she used to be a good doll, a real proper polite witch-toy. maybe the witch even had her help build new dolls, taught her a thing or two, just so the witch wouldn't have to do the boring parts, and what she can do now, that's just what she remembers. a few scraps from the witch's table, turned to mending instead of making."
you hear a very faint clatter, notice a judder in her hands that can't have been there earlier in the afternoon when her careful fingers were inside you. the teacup clattering ever so faintly against the saucer. only another doll would notice.
"that tea does smell quite good," you say. "perhaps just a sip?"
"oh, not a problem, let me pour you a fresh cup…" and her movements return to their normal grace.
old habits die hard, you suppose. if this was your place — if you had a place, hah, more like, if there was a place for you — you'd want to serve a guest too. so it goes.
it really is very good tea. □
it's just a preventative visit. you've been to see the reclusive doll before, damaged far worse than this. she'd taken your cake of stolen pu-erh, patched what could be patched, told you to come back in six months for a followup; she'd check that the epoxy and filler holding your shin together had stayed properly bonded.
you'd laughed at the time. six months for an ownerless doll? an unlikely eternity.
not long after, one gloomy middle-aged woman with a perpetually furrowed brow had noticed you casing her tea shop for the third time. she'd locked the door with a security remote before you could make a dash through it, and said, "i know what you are, but i'll bet not many else do. and you've been looking at the good stuff, which means you have decent taste. sit. let's talk about whether i call a friend of a friend, or whether you think you can pass for an employee."
and here you are, six months later in the reclusive doll's parlor, holding a small brown waxed-paper bag of milk oolong with the shop's logo imprinted on the front. it represents an uncomfortable fraction of what the shopkeeper had let you have recently; you weren't going to go dry, exactly, but you'd be running for a week or two on cheap bulk stuff pinched from orders that would never notice.
the door opens, but it is not the reclusive doll that comes out first.
"—do my best, but no promises i can't keep. anyway, that's what i got you for, yeah?"
the doll in the doorway is fascinating. you've never seen so many repairs on anyone still walking around. no more than three-quarters of her face is original porcelain, absolute maximum. the rest is patchwork replacement. there are shiny lines of solder bridging cracks, parallel to others filled with the dull matte epoxy that the reclusive doll uses, a cheek with a blue-white willow pattern that has to be a transplant from dining china, and her eye—
you look away as soon as she notices you staring, but her very eye is split by a gleaming gold lightning bolt of kintsugi work, holding the two unequal halves of her blue glass iris together.
"there's only so much i can do with hedge dollcraft, Calico! you're no Ship of Theseus. the original charms on your body will only stretch so far, and they'll only take so well on material like this."
her dress is just like her: it's a recognizable pattern, lacy but not entirely impractical. there are places where damaged fabric has been excised, patched, carefully replaced without changing the shape, but all done in black fabric. an image comes to mind: on the side of an abandoned building, burn scars.
"then you'll just have to get better, won't you? we both know that's what you want anyway."
"we can't always have what we want," the reclusive doll mutters, trailing the scarred doll into the parlor. then, "oh, you're here. Calico was just leaving."
Calico is in no hurry, apparently. she pauses in the middle of the parlor, turns, and gives you a slow look-over, mismatched glass eyes scanning hungrily for something.
"you said 'material like this'. what if we had better material?"
"we don't. and we can't get it."
"but what if we did?"
"then maybe. i don't know that it's been tried before."
"you'd try it."
the reclusive doll shrugs. "maybe. now get out. i have another patient."
"so you do," the scarred doll says, finally acknowledging your existence. "nice to meet you, another patient, however briefly. maybe we'll run into each other again, hmm?"
you move your free hand to cover the shop logo on the brown waxed-paper bag of oolong, but in your witch-crafted heart, you can feel — you know — you're absolutely sure — that you weren't fast enough. □
"look at the two of us," Calico says. "that went sideways fast, huh? but we're still here anyway."
you risk another look down. your skirt was floor-length this morning. you usually wear them long to cover the repair work on your right shin, which is subtle but still obvious if you're close enough. now the skirt hits at about mid-thigh, but it doesn't matter, you suppose, because there's nothing below mid-thigh on that side any more. your leg is gone. nothing left but a few stubborn shards holding onto a twisted frame.
you look her straight in her mismatched eyes, one brown, one blue and split into unequal halves by gold infill, with as much contempt as you can manage.
she nonchalantly pats at the smoldering ruins of her already much-repaired dress, lacy white patched with lacy black, with her remaining hand. "mostly still here. not bad for two dolls."
"we're done," you tell her. you hold up the spell-inscribed circular saw that opened the cut that let your ruin into the world. it's spattered in corrosive gore, blade still smoking. "we're trash."
"not like you were doing much with your existence anyway."
"i was clear of this. i had the tea shop."
"a human has the tea shop, and she's exploiting you as neatly as anything else would. can't have been that important, anyway. i showed up and you were all smiles and ready to go."
"that's how i always look when i'm working! and i thought i might have a chance to get you to leave."
she laughed. "that was stupid! of course i wasn't going to leave. if you'd put up a fuss i'd have burned the place down. i needed you. well. i needed a doll it hadn't seen before. i didn't need you you. but you did great anyway! we killed a witch!"
you look to the corpse on the floor of the witch house. it seems exaggerated in death, shattered bone looming through scraps of cloth and torn pallid flesh, sputtering internal fires casting shadows up the wall. it had been a little thing in the shape of a petite human woman when Calico had delivered herself to it, apparently relishing the return of a prodigal doll.
you'd known there was a flood ribbon coiled around Calico's arm, ready to unleash a sense-blinding deluge that'd give even a witch pause. you'd had a moment to try to run. but the saw she'd concealed in your bag lent you a weight and an import that you'd never felt before, and when the moment ended, you didn't run after all. more fool you.
"and we're here next to what's left of it, and we can't move, and a witch's death will draw scavengers. we're scrap. we're grog, Calico, we'll be lucky to be ground up and recycled."
she shrugged, a gesture that cracked something else in her, with an audible pop. "then that's how it goes. but hey, we're not going out thirsty. there's a vacuum flask in my bag. hot maofeng."
you glare at her, digging deeper into the well of contempt that you thought you'd used up. "and we're going to drink it out of what, exactly? the flask?"
"there're teacups. in the hutch. right there. i can't reach 'em, but you could."
there are, actually. a set, splashed with cheery gloss green over unglazed bisque. as vessels for a last drink go, you could do a lot worse.
you drag yourself over, slowly, past the witch, your truncated skirt smearing itself with ichor. you raise yourself on one knee and the ruin of a leg.
the teacups aren't the only thing behind the glass. it's a minature museum of junk. half-used candles next to chunks of raw jade and quartz next to a carefully-carved relief scene in dark copper-shot Elsewood…
you've seen something like the last before. you've used something like it before, a long time ago, before you made your own escape from your own witch's household. it's a door anchor. you slip it into your pocket before you make the long crawl back, made slower by the teacups you're clutching.
you pour, still having most of both of your hands. she sips. you sip. liquid green pleasure slides down your throat, and the weight of your end lifts a little.
"not bad," you allow.
"to doing," she says, raising her cup, "what we came here to do."
"Calico," you say, weary, "there never was a we," and you swing the flask. her face is already patchwork. it doesn't take long.
then you clutch the anchor in your pocket, and holding a place in your mind, you open the door.
you were never meant to see the inside of the reclusive dollcrafting doll's office from the outside of everything, walls in places that don't make sense in three dimensions, floor and ceiling stretching into infinity in the void, but it's over quickly enough. you and what's left of Calico drop, hard, onto the carpet.
luckily, the reclusive doll is there, paging through old notebooks at her desk. she's frozen, immobile with dollish surprise, but she recovers quickly.
"i know you, and i knew her," she says, "so you have ten seconds."
"you once said the original charms on a body would only stretch so far with conventional materials. i need repairs. i have materials," you say, gesturing to Calico.
"i have questions."
"i have a door anchor that might work once or twice more, and i have a weapon that killed a witch."
"no further questions. i'll keep the anchor, but that weapon leaves with you, and i have an idea about that, actually…"
twenty-six hours later, you stand up from the workbench. the reclusive doll offers you a selection of dresses, and a mirror. then she makes a complex hand motion next to the mirror, which goes black. you can see the saw blade now, a white toothed shadow, turning slowly in your chest.
"i can't show you where her parts are as easily. leg, fingers, yes, but other parts went all over."
"doesn't matter. they blend in so well. you'd never know," you whisper, letting your fingers linger on a lacy black and white dress. □