Time had long since stopped meaning anything to me.
Years passed like shadows slipping quietly across my display case. I had watched faces change, fashions evolve, the museum modernize with glass panels and digital lights.
By 2010, I was nothing more than a legend behind glass —
The Perfect Doll, still and silent as ever.
Children no longer whispered in awe. They pointed their phones and moved on. The world had grown faster, louder, and lonelier.
And I — I remained frozen in a century that had long forgotten me.
Until that night.
---
It began at midnight.
The museum was silent, save for the hum of air vents and the soft glow of the emergency lights. But then the air shifted — a faint tremor, like the breath of something unseen.
A mist began to form near the far end of the exhibit hall. It wasn't smoke. It wasn't light.
It was alive — a black haze that coiled and twisted, moving with an intelligence that didn't belong to the living.
I watched it drift closer, slow and deliberate, until it reached my glass case.
The temperature dropped.
The lights flickered.
And for the first time since 1986, I felt.
A strange pulse moved through me — not warmth, not cold, but something else entirely. It was as if the mist had reached through the glass and touched the hollow inside me where my soul had slept for a hundred years.
And then, it vanished.
Just like that.
The hall was still again. The lights steady. The mist gone.
---
I would have dismissed it as another illusion, another cruel dream of motion and life that my mind conjured to fill the emptiness.
But then —
Something shifted inside my arm.
A faint tremor. A sensation I had forgotten the meaning of.
I looked down, and my porcelain fingers… moved.
I froze, terrified of my own existence.
Then I tried again — a tiny movement of my hand, a flex of my wrist — and the sound of porcelain brushing against glass filled the air.
Tap.
I had touched the inside of the display case.
For a long moment, I couldn't believe it. I thought I was dreaming, lost in one of those strange, endless illusions of memory.
But when I pressed again — harder — the sound echoed clearly.
It was real.
I could move.
---
Panic and wonder flooded through me.
I pushed again, and the glass trembled beneath my touch.
"...No," I whispered.
The word startled me. It was high, soft, fragile — a little girl's voice.
It wasn't mine.
It wasn't Jacob's voice.
It was the voice of the body that now carried me.
Porcelain and silk.
A child's face, a child's tone.
But inside it — me.
My voice shook as I tried again, barely believing it.
"H… hello?"
The sound of my own voice filled the quiet room, strange and trembling. I laughed, and the laugh broke apart like glass under strain — half sob, half wonder.
After so many years of silence, the sound of speech was a miracle.
---
The glass before me cracked slightly as I pressed harder, my movements still clumsy and small.
Then, with one more desperate push — it shattered.
Shards fell across the marble floor, scattering like rain.
The museum alarms began to blare, but I didn't wait.
I stepped out.
The floor was cold beneath my porcelain feet, the air sharp with dust and electricity. I could feel the texture of everything — smooth, rough, real.
I was free.
For the first time in more than a century, I walked.
Each step felt uncertain, delicate, yet thrillingly alive. I moved past the other exhibits, past the remnants of the Titanic, the letters, the shoes, the jewelry.
Every object seemed to watch me — the ghosts of the past stirring as I passed them.
---
Outside the museum, the city was alive with lights.
Cars moved like glowing veins through the streets, and voices rose from far below.
I stood at the glass doors, watching the world I once belonged to — now transformed beyond recognition.
The reflection that stared back at me was both familiar and foreign.
A porcelain girl in a tattered blue dress, her glass eyes faintly glowing in the dark.
And somewhere inside that fragile shell — Jacob Moreau, breathing again through borrowed life.
The alarms blared behind me, footsteps echoed in the hall.
I turned to the doors. My hand trembled, unsure — but when I touched the metal handle, it gave way easily, as if the world itself wanted me to step through.
And so I did.
The cold night air kissed my face. The wind moved through my hair — my hair.
I took one deep breath, though I had no lungs to fill, and whispered to the sky:
> "I'm free."
For the first time, the world answered not with silence…
but with the hum of life.
And I walked into it — fragile, trembling, reborn.