Chapter Text
WHEN BILLIE PALMER FIRST GOT the package, her first thought was that it had to be some sort of sick joke.
She'd just come home from work - finally, she'd been there for almost three extra hours between a teachers' meeting and marking the last of the quizzes she'd given her eighth graders the previous day - and there it was, sitting on her front stoop. A small brown package, bulged slightly with what was clearly something awkwardly stuffed in there.
Billie had been only mildly confused - she hadn't ordered anything recently or been expecting any gifts, had the mailman left this at the wrong address? - before she stepped onto the stoop, bent down to pick the package up, and promptly lost all her breath. Her name and address were scrawled onto the package in thick black marker, the letters sharp and a bit shaky, but what drew her eye was the logo printed on the top right corner.
Yellow background, one red letter and the rest black. They spelled out a word she had spent the last decade trying her best to leave behind: Playtime.
Billie's chest constricted. Her hand, clutching the package, shook slightly. She was frozen, standing there just outside her front door, unable to take her eyes off of that dreaded logo.
What the hell was this? She hadn't heard from Playtime Co. or anyone connected to it in nine years, not since the last time she'd spoken to Leith Pierre - and she doubted that he would ever want to contact her again, after the words she'd hurled at him before storming out of his damned cushy home office. And as far as she knew, the two of them were the only Playtime workers left after… after it had happened.
Who could possibly have been sending her this package, contacting her after ten years? And, the better question, why?
Moving slowly, her hands shaking and feeling strangely numb, Billie fished her keys out of the pocket of her jacket and unlocked her front door. Her eyes never left the thick manila envelope in her other hand as she half-stumbled into the house, toeing off her sneakers and closing the door behind her.
She walked straight into the kitchen, not even stopping to take off her jacket. Fumbling around in one of the drawers, she pulled out a sharp knife and sliced the envelope open, and turned it upside down to let the contents spill onto her kitchen table.
From the envelope came a single piece of paper, folded up but with red letters faintly visible through it, and a slightly battered VHS tape. When Billie picked it up, she could see the three words written on it in what looked like blue crayon: Vintage Poppy Commercial.
Billie's brows furrowed. Presumably Poppy referred to Poppy Playtime, the old doll that had been Playtime Co.'s first huge success, but that toy hadn't been remotely popular for years before Billie had even started working for the company. Why had someone sent her an old doll commercial?
Well, only one way to find out.
Clutching the tape and the still-unfolded paper in her hand, Billie trudged into the living room and switched on her little television before popping the VHS into the player. She sat down heavily on her small couch, still feeling a bit like the world was far away from her, as it started to play.
A man Billie didn't recognize came into view, walking towards the camera. "You are about to see the most incredible doll ever invented," he said, in a voice that sounded straight out of a classic radio broadcast. "Her name is Poppy, and she is the first truly intelligent doll in the world. A little girl can talk to her, Poppy gives her answers; she is the first doll actually able to have a conversation with a child."
Billie had never had a Poppy Playtime doll of her own - she'd been born a while too late for it to be the toy every little girl in America owned - but her mother had, when she was little. It had been donated when she'd become a teenager and had no more need of it, but she'd told Billie about playing with the doll when her daughter had first been hired at Playtime Co.
"I always had fun playing with her," she'd said, "talking to her, and that poppy smell from her hair really did calm me at night, just like it was always advertised."
"It wasn't ever… weird?" Billie had asked, then. "Talking to a doll and having it talk back like it could actually understand you?"
Her mother had gotten an odd look on her face then, frowning in a thoughtful, faintly bothered way, and it had been a long moment before she'd answered.
"Sometimes," she'd said quietly, "I really did think she actually understood me. That she was really taking in what I was saying."
Outside of her own head, the commercial had moved on to showing Poppy off, talking about how she liked her shoes shined and how sturdy her hair was. Then the cheerful commercial announcer asked, "Is there anything else you'd like to say, Poppy?" and the camera cut to a direct shot of Poppy's face. It felt like she was looking directly into Billie's eyes.
"I'm a real girl," the doll said sweetly, "just like you."
It was ridiculous, Billie thought, to feel her heart beat harder just because of some words spoken by a toy through the TV, but it picked up just the same. She sat stock-still as the commercial moved on to talking about Playtime Co. offering tours of their factory, almost feeling like she could still feel Poppy's eyes on her.
And then the video cut to something else. No longer a black-and-white commercial with cheerful music playing in the background - silent footage of a catwalk high above the ground, leading into what looked like a small door with a large poppy flower painted around it. It struck Billie, looking at it: that place looked very much like it could be inside the old factory. She was seeing the inside of Playtime Co. for the first time in ten years.
Her heartbeat was in her head, drowning out all sound. She lurched up from the couch and over to the TV set, practically slamming her finger onto the VHS's eject button. The screen cut abruptly to reflective black, taking the painted flower with it.
She sat there for a long moment, on the floor, trying to breathe deeply. She couldn't… who could have possibly gone into the factory, which no one was supposed to have stepped foot in since the day it happened, to get this footage? And why in God's name had it been sent to her, of all people, a woman who'd in all reality been nothing more than a glorified babysitter in that place?
A small fluttering of paper came from across the room, and her head jerked up to see the piece of paper falling from the couch - she must have let go of it at some point. Half-frantic, Billie crawled across the floor and snatched it up, hoping in an absolutely desperate way that some damned answers might be written on it.
The paper was Playtime Co. stationary, the kind she remembered the company memos always being written on. On it, in awkward bright red letters and spelling, were only three lines.
Everyone thinks the staff dissapeared 10 years ago. Wer'e still here. FIND THE FLOWER.
The last three words were in all capitals, boldly underlined in the same red. Underneath them was a rather nice drawing of a poppy - a little outside the lines, but still something she could easily praise a child for - and on the corner of the page…
Billie found she wasn't the least bit surprised to discover that it was dried blood.
•••••••••••••••
She told her parents and brothers she was going on vacation. Just up to Chicago for the week, she'd said, I just need to get away for a tiny bit.
She hadn't told the school principal where she was going, just that she'd be using some of her vacation time for once. My lesson plans for the next few days are all in my desk. And honestly, if the sub wants to do something fun with the kids, I won't be upset when I come back.
They'd all believed her, her parents and the principal and Tommy. Franklin hadn't.
"So, where are you really going?" her twin brother asked almost as soon as he'd stepped into Billie's house. Brown eyes, the exact same shade as her own, peered up at her from behind Franklin's glasses as he bent down to take his shoes off.
Trying to appear unbothered, Billie moved away from the door, back into the house. "Whatever happened to hello, Frankie?"
She heard Franklin sigh from behind her. "Hello, where are you really going?"
"What makes you think I'm lying about just going to-"
"Billie," he cut her off. She turned back around to see him standing up in the entryway, arms crossed. "Come on. You can lie to Mom and Dad and Tommy, but you can't lie to me. You don't take vacations."
That… well, that was true. Billie had taken exactly one vacation since she'd first started as a teacher, and that was only because Bella Harper, one of her fellow teachers, had insisted that she was going to have a breakdown if she kept going without stopping. Even then, she hadn't even gone anywhere, just stayed around the house and visited her parents to help them with their own things.
She hadn't taken time off from work voluntarily since it had happened, and whatever had happened, she hadn't been there for it.
She sighed. She'd always hated lying to her twin, and she knew she was a bit caught here. But Franklin was going to kill her.
"Come and sit down." She lead him into the living room and picked up the letter and VHS tape from the coffee table, sitting down next to him.
"I got this yesterday." She handed her brother the paper. "And the VHS. In a package with the Playtime logo."
Franklin's head jerked up, his eyes wide as he looked at her. "From Playtime? But I thought it was only you and that bastard CEO-"
"That are left, yeah," Billie interrupted, throat suddenly feeling tight. "But this letter… we might have been wrong about that."
Franklin looked at the paper, seeming not to notice the blood on it the way Billie had. "You don't seriously think… just because of this?"
"Not just because of that." Billie grabbed the VHS and held it up. "There's footage here from inside the factory, Frankie, recent footage. Someone's been in there, someone sent this to me."
Franklin frowned. "But we've got no way of knowing who that is. And you can't exactly just show up in Thebes and walk into the old place."
"I can still get in," Billie returned. "Remember when we broke into the pool every other night the summer we were fifteen?"
"It's not exactly the same thing," Franklin huffed, "and you shouldn't put yourself at risk when you've got no idea if anyone's actually-"
"Franklin."
Billie's voice was choked, her throat feeling like it had a rock in it. Her eyes stung as he looked at her twin, as his face softened and he squeezed her hand.
Franklin spoke softly, tentatively. "I know it's always been hard for you. Not knowing what happened to the kids."
Billie scoffed. "That's a fucking understatement."
The Playcare children - her children, in almost every sense of it. She hadn't been able to get out of bed for almost a week after they'd gone missing with everyone else, and she knew how much she'd concerned her family during that time. Even now, she still woke up from nightmares sometimes, reaching out to hold a small hand that was no longer there.
She'd worked seven years taking care of those kids. Even though she had some new ones now, with all the children she taught, their absence still felt like a gaping wound on her soul every day. And she'd gotten no answers about what had happened to them, no matter how hard she'd looked or who she'd talked to. She could still remember begging Leith Pierre when she'd finally been able to track him down, remember how fiercely her eyes had burned from trying not to cry.
"I only want to know where they are," she'd pleaded. "Did you manage to get them all adopted? Did you move them somewhere else?"
The former executive had stared back at her, with an expression that could only have been described as disdain. "Miss Palmer, you don't work for Playtime Co. anymore. No one does. The children aren't your concern any longer."
That was all he'd really said on the matter, until he'd eventually threatened to "have Billie removed". She'd stormed out, still hurling insults at him all the way - she didn't think she'd ever been that angry before or since - and that was the last she'd heard about any of her children. Until today.
"Billie," Franklin said gently. "I know you want to know what happened to them, I understand, but this isn't - I don't want you to get hurt."
"They're my kids." Billie looked at him, deep in his eyes, begging him to understand. "They've always been my kids, even after all this time. I need to know what happened to them, Frankie, even if it's that they're…"
She trailed off, unable to say it. The words hung in the air around them: even if it's that they're all dead.
After a long, tense moment of silence, Franklin sighed. "Alright."
Billie blinked. "Alright?"
"Alright," said Franklin. "I won't tell anyone where you're really going. But we have to set some rules, make a timeline for how long you're going to be gone."
Billie took a deep breath, relief flooding her. It felt like a weight had been lifted off her chest, knowing that Franklin wasn't going to jeopardize her mission. She'd be able to go and find her answers after all.
She looked at her brother, her twin. They'd always looked so much alike - dark ginger hair, dark brown eyes, sharp noses, pale skin that had always sunburned as easily as breathing - and they'd been the best of friends their entire lives. Franklin had been the keeper of her secrets, her biggest comfort when she was upset, the one person who knew her better than she knew herself. It was really no surprise that he was willing to help her here; she felt bad that she'd ever doubted him.
"Give me one week. I'll be leaving tomorrow, give me one week after that. And I might not be able to check in every day, but if I'm not back or heading back after the week's up, you can send police to the factory."
Franklin paused, sighed, nodded once. "One week. Unless you actually do find something, that's all, Willow."
"Don't call me that," Billie replied as a long-held reflex, moving to hug him even as she spoke. Franklin wrapped his arms around her, squeezing warmly as Billie hooked her chin over his shoulder.
One week. She had one week to explore her old workplace, find that flower from the footage, and maybe, hopefully find out what happened to her children after ten years hurting and wondering.
She'd better make the most of it.