what if, in some au, lyney is an old marionette puppet, made from wood cut from an enchanted forest so that he could move and think on his own, whose circus has discarded him and his sister, lynette, aside in favour of newer, more elegant ones. for years, they lie there, unmoving, gathering dust and cobwebs, the very purpose of their existences stripped from them by those who created it. slowly, their consciousness fades with their colour, until they are little more than a pair of standard marionettes lying amidst the faded memories of an old fairground.
one day, you, an aspiring artist and carpenter, stumble into an abandoned circus tent, and discover a pair of life-sized puppets slumped in the corner. upon closer inspection, your breath is taken away by how intricately they are designed, and it pains you to see these beautiful masterpieces in such a state of disrepair; so, you take them home with you, and part with your savings to buy high-quality paints. through day and night, you painstakingly go over what remains of the now-flaking paint of the puppets, adding little details and flourishes of your own here and there when the original is too faded to follow. you add a little teardrop on the cheek of one puppet—you imagine he smiles a lot, but inside is sad—and a star on the other’s: she strikes you as the one with true inner confidence. you don’t know why you think these things about them; they’re just pieces of wood after all. if they could talk, though, this is how you picture they’d act.
you grow oddly fond of these puppets, often talking to them while you work as though they are real people who can hear what you have to say. sometimes, you pat their heads or their shoulders, and congratulate them for being such good patients.
the warmth of this human touch stirs lyney back into a state of sentience. he can feel new paint on his wooden skin, sense the care and passion with which you’ve brought these forgotten marionettes back to beauty. he can also sense lynette beginning to wake up like he has, similarly prompted back into the world by this newfound presence.
he sits there, unmoving, as you paint and polish them for hours on end, rambling on about your passions and everything you have to do later in the day, and curiously enough, lyney starts… well, he thinks he starts falling for you.
as a man crafted of wood, he knows he has no heart. so why does he look forward to whenever you return to your workshop, humming to yourself as you work? why does he yearn to reach out and hold your hand to his cheek when you’re cupping his face, eyes narrowed with concentration as you add little details with your brush to his eyebrow?
however, he’s too afraid to reveal his sentience to you: what if you’re afraid of him and his sister, and leave him like the circus did? what if you grow to hate him?
so he stays motionless, pretending to be mere woods as you renovate him. maybe, when you finish, he’ll reveal himself to you properly.
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
romaincrisis
origamiaround
pixelskylines
izzy806
