Brutus: The Broken Bear

Brutus was never meant to be loved.  

The Bordesley Hollow toy factory did not create toys for joy. It created them for profit, cheap, hollow things, stitched together in the dark by tired hands that have since fled. The factory floor was a place of tortures and whispers, where machines never slept and the air reeked of glue and melted plastic.  

He was made there, in that choking, dark, and passionless factory, a patchwork soul built from leftover scraps that should have been discarded. His broken heart was stitched over as if it had never beaten, and his stitched skull was pulled too tight, an accident never corrected. A toy not meant to be played with.

A reject.  

The others, the pretty dolls, the bright tin soldiers, the soft teddy bears, were boxed up and sent away to homes they would never see. He was left behind, thrown onto a pile of broken parts, waiting to be burnt. The unbearable fears of what was to come occupying his every thought until he became the fear he desperately tried to run from.

When the factory went up in flames and the friends he once called family turned to ashes, consumed within his fur, he was left alone with nothing but haunted memories that surfaced in flashbacks and cold sweats, none of which any medication could control.

No one knows how the fire started. Some say something inside the factory grew tired of all the suffering. Others whisper that the toys had begun to scream at night. But the flames came all the same, swallowing the building in a choking inferno. Workers ran, machines twisted and melted, and in the chaos Brutus crawled from the ash half-alive completely broken. 

Brutus should not exist. he knows that. He should have been nothing, just another forgotten failure. But the fire changed him. The darkness filled him with dread. And now he remembers everything, every cruel hand that threw him aside, every flame that licked at his fabric skin, every whisper of children who never knew he was meant to be theirs.  

Now Brutus wanders the ruins of Bordesley Hollow, skittering through the abandoned streets, his stitched mouth twitching, his crudely stitched heart searching. He hides from the light. The memories are too loud there. The pain caused by PTSD is too real.  

He does not know what he wants. Brutus only knows he cannot stop shaking.  

Because sometimes, when it is very quiet, he swears the flames are still coming for him. He lives every day in despair surviving through the hope that one day he will be found and the love he once had inside him is still there as he searches for a home with acceptance so his invisible wounds can finally heal.