#stop burying your fancy expensive toys in the sandbox you're gonna break him

[echodoctor]

Something I’ve seen played with a little in art but never in fic is running with the idea of the healers literally being dolls and showing some physical effects of that.

I especially want to see it combined with the idea that all three are completely different toys, made of different materials.

Personally, I enjoy the headcanon that doll Haruspex is made of leather (easy to scratch and scar if handled roughly but ultimately tough enough that a little cosmetic damage isn’t going to permanently destroy it, once-living skin cut away from the flesh of a body, specifically part of a cow, one of the earlier materials humans figured out how to work with in most traditional crafts), while the Bachelor and Changeling dolls are porcelain (expensive and “high-class”, inorganic and cold to the touch, harder than leather but also much more fragile, delicate when whole but cracks into something sharp and dangerous when it breaks) and cloth (soft and easy to rip and tear but also much easier to repair in a way that neither porcelain or leather are, can also be “of the earth” at one remove if you’re dealing with thread spun from an organic fiber like cotton or wool, has some fun mythological associations with destiny and prophecy a la the Fates weaving the threads of mortal lives) respectively.

There’s outright a line of dialogue where Dankovsky tells Artemy about them being toys, and he responds with: “You are also better-crafted than me, oynon. Take a look at us-a closer look. You are probably right about me, I'm not a toy to keep-unbending, leather-made, old, and shabby. You, on the other hand, are an entirely different thing! I'm surprised they're playing such a bad game with you...”

It’d be really fun to see something from the perspective of an NPC getting a brief look at something deeper, or one of the healers observing the other two, for that unsettling ambiguity- the Haruspex has tough, leathery skin? Well, not so surprising for a man who works heavily with his hands, but it’s odd to this degree... The Bachelor has always been pale- but has he always been quite that pale, so literally bloodless and dead white? You see the Changeling playing cat’s cradle with some string, but it’s hard to tell where the string is coming from- can it be that a loose thread in her fingertips has unraveled? 

Or if you wanted fluff but Weird And Surreal (and why wouldn’t you, really) you could do something with the healers taking care of each other when their... unique conditions act up. One of the others carefully stitching together a ripped seam on Clara, or gripping Artemy’s hands until he gets feeling back in them.