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Dust softens the edges of the dark threshold as the Dollmaker appears in the doorway, recognition in their eyes. They smile, proud they knew who was coming although the two have taken to not knocking over the time they’ve been gone, ever since the Elder needed somewhere to clean the Younger’s wounds.They haven’t seen a child in well, how long depends on which part of them e’re discussing, but the Dark World doesn’t seem to store those who left their worlds young near here. But to be fair, they don’t leave the workshop they’ve created very often. It’s easier to let people in than have to deal with all that’s outside. And, well, they let the Butcher in.
The Butcher didn’t come for a story. They didn’t come for anything, really. The Dollmaker knows this, how their home is handcrafted like the rest of them, it’s not made by the world that creates all its own hellscapes, they’ve heard it all before and it’s getting awfully boring. So they start the story anyway.
“Do you hear the song yet?” They ask the little hunter, the one with hair grown over his ears and eyes wide like those of a deer stopped in its tracks. Physically, the child is unremarkable. He shakes his head in response while the elder hunter looks at the cadaver that he’s brought in and asks for instructions on which parts they need. After the Dollmaker answers – eyes, hands, feet, and anything that looks interesting, then do what you want with the rest – they turn their interest back to the younger one. He looks barely anything like the Butcher, who calls him lad. Sure, they have the same crook in their nose and the younger one’s double canines are coming in and their fingers are long enough to reach the trigger, but the little hunter isn’t the Butcher. Yet. Yet he died before the song could ever play in his ears.
“Well, child, I think you’d like to learn what would’ve occurred if your story converged into that of your caretaker – you are the same, yes, are you not?” The boy nods. The Butcher is preoccupied with his carving knife, and he doesn’t particularly notice that any tale past “Da taught us how to hunt,” could be shared. At least, not yet. They were the same, yet they didn’t particularly know how they meld into one another, what choices they made differently if they were even made before the child came to the Dark World.
They start on the story, curling their lip away from their teeth so they can speak more openly. “Well, your father was more than the man who took you on that first hunt I’ve heard the Butcher tell you so much about – there must be another, then another.” The boy nods once again – he doesn’t talk very much, if at all, but the Butcher does enough talking for the both of them when the two are together. Talking, singing, it only takes instructions to teach someone how to shoot a gun. They’re not sure the Butcher notices – or maybe the Butcher remembers, that was him, too.
“On your second hunt, you were excited. This time, it was a deer hunt, I believe. It was the right season for it, after all. This time, there weren’t any of the other men. Just you and your family – your father. That was the first time you used a gun – you told me that when you offered your service,” the Dollmaker’s mismatched eyes flick over to the elder hunter with his knife, father taught me young, hadn’t been hunting much before he showed me how to shoot, the Butcher spoke as the Dollmaker considered something they hadn’t before – if someone could be useful without being a part of their work – not as payment, but another offering entirely. Somebody only an inch better than hunting in their own domain, hm? The Dollmaker was interested, they still are. The Boy looks at the Butcher, squinting trying to picture him chasing down a deer. His eyes dropped down to his own hands, his sight suddenly as heavy as buckshot as he looks down at his own hands, the fingers just long enough to reach the trigger, which the Butcher is proud of him for.
“You brought a dog that time, a loud baying thing with slick brown fur, and it chased and nipped at the deer, and the taste of the blood from your last hunt was still in your mouth,” the Dollmaker smiles, eyes now fully focused on those of the child, and attention focused towards him too. They don’t hear the Butcher, the Elder one, when he says “Why are you telling the lad all that?” He didn’t live to know it, so it’s better to protect him from it – take the boy on his own hunts, teach him everything that his father taught him and omit every time that he didn’t, or taught wrong. But the Dollmaker doesn’t hear, so they continue to speak, looking vaguely amused.
“Yet this time he was just there to let you hold a gun, show you how. He didn’t let you kill the deer, and you got angry. You’d hunted once, why not try it again? He’d handed you a butchers’ knife for after the hunt was over, and you pulled it out then, tried to trade or threaten or something in between the two. You scared the deer away and it limped out of sight – that was the first and only time you let yourself fail at a hunt. You were ashamed, and your father took your knif–” then the story is interrupted, as the Butcher lashes out – first time in what, sixty years that he wasn’t supposed to. He has the knife, covered in brown crusted blood, and he swings it at the Dollmaker’s arm.
“Lad, be grateful you didn’t live long enough to fail, and…you. Why did you tell the lad that – that story? I–I hardly remember that, why’d you think it was important to tell? The lad doesn’t need to know what I did, he’s different.” The Butcher gets in as many words as possible before the knife connects, tearing the stitches in the Dollmaker’s flesh. They don’t bleed, their body isn’t made for that, but their arm is still cut and only half hanging onto their shoulder. The child stands and rifles through his shoulder bag.
The Dollmaker’s eyes widen and they speak through gritted teeth at their now former business partner. “He wanted a story – he needs to know his life although he died before most could happen. Boy, there is no time you didn’t fight once your father died – you were afraid before that,” the knife tears out of their flesh, and goes into a second point near one of their right elbows and they snarl, wondering if they have any spare parts save for the last corpse the Butcher brought in.
“Leave. Both of you, back to the Hunt, leave my workshop.” They use their free arm, the one with the clawed fingernails, to pry the man off of them, and take his knife. “You may never see me again, you may run into me, it all depends, but I don’t want you to concern yourself with it.”
The boy is out of the door in under a minute, and his elder soon follows, angry, face peeled into a snarl and hands still painted with blood. There goes his companion, the tall one who says too much and handcrafts everything. Well, the little hunter was going to learn anyway, wouldn’t he? Would the Butcher remember how angry he got, or would he take it for excitability. Nevermind that – he needs a new knife.
The boy leaves some semitransparent thread and a needle as sterile as you can get in the Dark World on a side table near the entryway of the workshop. For them to fix their arm – they have a lot of thread already, but the gesture makes them consider that they were right. The boy wanted to know what would’ve happened if his father hadn’t killed him sooner. He wonders why the Butcher wouldn’t tell him that it wasn’t his fault that he died – that his father just made the rules, and imposed them inconsistently.
The Dollmaker looks at the corpse – it’s cut up very evenly, very good work that they’re sad they have to lose. But this is the Dark World, the place where all is lost. And they were trying to help the boy gain something within – if only to see the reaction they were equally entertained and angered by.