Luna Meriatchi
Once upon a time, there was a doll named Luna, and she was very happy. She had a little girl, who was sweet and did not tug her about by her hair, and there were many tea parties of water in pink plastic cups.
Luna had a wind-up key in her back, but she and her girl politely did not mention it. It was a degrading thing that her makers had thought her incapable of entertaining her future girl without the tortured, helpless steps that the key forced her to take whether she wished to or not. If her girl had been capable of removing it, Luna was sure that she would, but it was firmly fastened to her clockwork insides, and too risky to try to break off.
Her girl had just turned seven, and there were many small children at the house, smearing brightly coloured icing-sugar everywhere and screaming happily. Luna and her girl were in the sitting room surrounded by other children who were waiting eagerly for Luna's girl to open their gifts. All at once, the screams coming from the front became higher, shriller, and then there was an abrupt wet coughing sound, and silence.
They had knives, not guns. Guns would have been quicker, kinder. Perhaps that was why the men did not have them.
"Opening your presents, girlie?" one said to Luna's girl. "Nice doll you got." He picked up Luna, clearly thinking she was a new toy, and flipped her over. Then he wound up her key and set he down, facing her girl, so Luna saw every second of her girl's bloody, agonizing death, helpless and trapped in her own ceramic body, moving jerkily back and forth across the floor.
She made them pay for it. After her girl was dead--
Well. To a doll, there is nothing left. Usually, it is a gradual process, gentler, a little easier to accept, as the child plays less and less until they stop altogether.
She could make herself walk, after all, in pain and terrified every moment of it, but she owed her girl that much. One of them caught her across the mouth, ripping the cloth open, but there were advantages to being a doll. She sewed her mouth back before she tracked down the last one in his home, the one who had killed her girl in a matter of moments.
She did not show him such mercy.
