AN: Written for the Awesome Ladies ficathon on livejournal.
Fic:
The biggest lies they ever told me were these:
Someone made you out of rags, from the scraps that were left over. I dreamt about it one night, and I didn't tell anyone. I didn't need to see them pretend it wasn't real. But I know it was a memory, my first memory. After all the years of having to explain that being made out of rags was more environmentally conscious, that it gave me a quirky indie-type appeal, after all the questions about what important thing I was the remnants of, my dream told me the story of my birth. I was another doll, a hard doll that couldn't move, and I kept pushing and pushing to bend my limbs or turn my waist until I broke, split right in two. And then I was free, I was able to move, and the first thing I did was rip my body into pieces and sew everything back into the wrong place. And then I could move, I could jump, I could THINK, and I knew that these torn up strips of me were supposed to be torn, that was their purpose all along...
Red is the color of warning, the color of "STOP". It took me a long time to realize that the warnings weren't for my sake, they were for theirs. Don't say things out loud just because they're true, you might offend instead of delight. Don't want things that a doll doesn't get to want and really shouldn't even know about and who told you about that anyway... Let whoever wants to hold you hold you, and never let anyone see you without your smile. All these rules, these stop signs on my life, were made to protect me. But then for some reason, I just couldn't stop thinking that they were to protect everyone else. FROM me.
The shelf is your home; it is enough for you. It's a piece of wood on a wall in a house, with a top, a set of jacks, something called a wii, and me. Call me old-fashioned, but that's not what I call an adventure. The other dolls, the ones on shelves less dusty, say that I'm too cynical, that I'll be miserable wherever I go. It's in my nature. But I think somewhere there's something more. It may no be happiness, it may not be perfect, but it won't be me sitting on a shelf, wondering if I've figured out yet how to tell when time passes me by. It will be something new, and from, maybe I will be something new. I can make myself a different Ann if I want; I've done once. I'll do it again.