Disclaimer: Alas, still nothing

AN: This one was incredibly short. A little more than 500 words altogether before I added the third day, which says something. And just so you know, we are quickly approaching the reason behind this story's tragedy label. You have been warned.

August 11

Geppetto was sleeping. It was weird for this time of day, but not alarming—his torso moved just slightly as he breathed, and the thinnest line of drool seeped from his lip onto his desk, indicating that he was, indeed, alive. It was hard to tell just then-- a deathly pallor had spread over his skin. Beside him lay an odd contraption—the three quartz pieces she'd retrieved, engraved with some odd symbols and set inside a large metal ring, all attached to a string of wires. It looked sort of like a convoluted dream-catcher, just… not. Weird, confusing, but not beyond the scope of a Scientist.

The bad thing—the one very disconcerting fact—was that the little figure was gone. The scraps were all there—the loose threads, the remnants of canvas, a few spare pieces of wire. Just no little doll thing.

Maybe he'd already given it to… whoever he was supposed to give it to. Some higher-up, probably.

Silently she deposited the results of her newest scavenger hunt on the crate by his desk (six microscopes, four pieces of glass, some thin sheets of what she could only guess was aluminum, and a dozen old-fashioned ink well pens). She'd tell him about the missing project when he woke up. He looked like he needed the sleep.

...

August 15

Alex came to relieve Sam as the ninth hour of her shift drew to a close. She'd been eager to go—Lizzy had made her promise to hurry home so they could play together. It wasn't much—just a board game that Sam had retrieved from the ruins of a toy store when she'd collected parts for Geppetto. She would have left right away, in fact, except for the bulge in Alex's shirt. Something had been stuffed up his sleeve, and he wasn't doing a great job of hiding it.

"What's that?" she asked, poking the bulge. It was soft. Not plushy soft, but… soft.

"Nothing," he said quickly.

"Come on, tell me," she said, poking it again. "What is—" Something poked out. Something pale and striped with thin lines of yellow and gray. Chagrined, he removed it from his sleeve. "What is that?"

"Garden gloves," he said indignantly. "What's it look like?"

"Are you…" she shook her head, puzzled. "…planning on doing some weeding tonight? I hate to break it to you, Alex, but there's not a lot of dandelions left. You're gonna have to find a new hobby."

"They're not for me!" he snapped, seizing the gloves protectively. "They're for Geppetto. He wanted something sturdy, and…" He rubbed the fabric of the gloves between his fingers. "This is pretty strong stuff."

"You've got a point," she said with a shrug. She was pretty sure the old man had meant for whole pieces of fabric—stuff he could sew into 'skin' for the little dolls he made. But at least Alex was making an effort. She was sure the Scientist would take the gloves and thank him and use them when he was welding or something.

It would be just like him to do that. Nice and polite in that old-fashioned way of his. Optimistic, too—so far both of his dolls had gone missing, and he didn't seem even slightly concerned about finding them.

"Anyway, I've got a game to catch."

...

August 18

"I can't believe you decided to use the gloves," Sam said. She was incensed, just waiting for something to set her off. Geppetto, ever considerate even in his failing health, decided to oblige her:

"Is something bothering you?"

"Of course not. Why would you ever think that?" The acid left her voice. "Do you have any idea where I found my sister this morning?" she demanded, pacing furiously behind him.

"Where's that?" Geppetto asked, not looking up from the two tiny bodies he was working on.

"In the wardrobe. As in a closet. Except that we don't live in a house anymore, we live in Grandpa's old bomb shelter, and those don't have closets." She stomped at the floor. "She made a closet out of a bunch of old cans and a couple planks of wood and she threw all her clothes inside and started digging around in it."

"Why would she do that?" he asked, carefully placing the glass-filled tube that would become an eye into its socket.

"Looking for Narnia." Sam laughed bitterly. "She said she was going to go and find Aslan to fix everything for us. Kill the machines and bring everyone back to life. And if that doesn't work, let's just go and live there. She wanted me to meet Mr. Tumnus. Said I would love him."

"It sounds like a wonderful dream," Geppetto mused.

"But it's not a dream. She thinks it's real. She's been doing nothing but reading those books for weeks, and she honestly thinks she's gonna go out and find a talking lion to save the world. It's not healthy!"

"I see." He tested the tiny piece—the iris opened and shut perfectly. "What did you do?"

"I gave her a copy of The Lord of the Rings and a dictionary," Sam said, slumping down in the spare chair. She heard a faint skittering sound by her feet and swore under her breath. "You might want to keep an eye on that canvas, Geppetto. It looks like you've got rats."

"I'll look into it."

"Dunno how they survived all this time," she muttered. "You'd think the gas would have gotten 'em all or something."

"Life finds a way," Geppetto said, holding out one of the dolls to study it from a distance. This one looked finished, but the other remained little more than a metal frame stuffed inside an old glove. Satisfied, he painted a 3 on the first and moved on to the second.

"I'm not cut out for this sort of thing," she said, talking as much to herself as to the Scientist. "I'm not my mom. I shouldn't be telling Lizzy not to believe in talking lions and fairytales. I should be telling her…" she sighed. "I should be telling her that boys are idiots the first time some jerk dumps her. I should be telling her that she doesn't have to look like those stupid magazines, and showing her how to put on makeup and stuff her bra." She flushed for a moment, remembering that Geppetto was still in the room, but shoved the embarrassment aside. He showed no sign of shame, so why should she? "Normal things, you know? I shouldn't be here. The world shouldn't be this way."

For a while the two of them lapsed into silence as the Scientist sewed the little figurine's skin together.

"Where are your parents?" he asked at last. "You never mentioned them before."

"Dead," she said too quickly. It had been smoldering inside of her, bubbling and boiling and waiting to burst at the first provocation. Problem was, nowadays most people didn't ask about that sort of thing. She hadn't been able to talk to Lizzy about it—she'd just handed her a book where a character died and hoped the child would make the connection on her own. "My dad was a soldier. Mom worked in one of the factories. Machines killed them both."

Another long silence passed between them while Geppetto mustered the courage to speak. This was his fault. He shouldn't have agreed to help the Chancellor. He shouldn't have made the BRAIN. He shouldn't have made it as intelligent as he did. He shouldn't have...

He shouldn't have done a lot of things.

"I'm sorry," he said at last, and he honestly meant it.

"There's bigger stuff to worry about right now," she said, staring determinedly at her gun. "I'll cry about it when we get all this taken care of." She cleared her throat and rubbed a speck of dust from her eye—dust, that's all it was, she promised—and looked for some way to change the subject.

"You know, people talked about it sometimes—that machines that could think were a bad idea. What if they turn on us or something, that sort of thing. I never believed it. That was all too sci-fi for real life, you know? It could never happen." She shifted in her chair. "I didn't join the Rebels for any of that. The Chancellor was a jerk and protesting was cool and all, but…" What the heck. It's not like she had anything better to do, and it was better than sobbing about things she couldn't change. "Truth is, I joined because of a boy. Gunter. Kind of weird name for around here, but with a face like that I really didn't care. He was all into this sort of thing—I thought if I joined he might notice me or something." She chuckled to herself. "It felt like it was so important at the time. Like nothing could matter more than getting some guy to like me. But that's life, I guess. Priorities change."

Another weight off her chest. She felt relieved. The two of them spent the rest of her shift debating whether talking lions were any better than wizards and magic rings, and for a brief moment the Scientist and his guard allowed themselves to escape the world of war. She left reluctantly when Alex came to relieve her of duty, but not before hearing a tiny, tinny voice whispering from a corner:

"What's a lion?"