This is my first Princess Tutu fanfic (Yeah!^^), and I wanted to write about a character that people don't know much about. Since I'm very interested in puppets, I decided I would write a story about Edel. The story explains how she came to exciste and how her interest in a human's heart was born. I don't own Princess Tutu or any of the characters, I just like to write about them:).

And now, let us hear the story of Edel...Read and enjoy.

A Puppet's Heart

I'm a puppet.

That is the only thing I know.

No, I know a few other things too: I'm made of wood and shaped into the form of a woman. I have green hair, a pale face, and a white, frilly dress. I have strings that tie all my body parts up. My legs, my arms, my hands, my head, everywhere.

There are also others puppets here in this place. They don't do anything except for hanging loose in their strings. They don't speak either. I look different from all the others puppets here. I don't know why.

Apart from the fact that I know that I'm a puppet, I don't know anything. I don't know who did this. I don't know who shaped me into this form and gave me this appearance. When I tried to look around, I noticed I couldn't turn my head. I couldn't move any part of my body because of my strings. I could only think, and when I tried new fresh thoughts entered my empty head with new facts.

They told me that I was in a world full of gears. What is a gear, I asked. They told me that gears are round objects with straight ends, teeth are they called. They were everywhere. Some were turning and made a soft ticking noise, others hang still in midair and didn't made a sound. But they didn't only hang. They lie all over the place. Scattered like the pieces of a broken glass, shinning and silent.

I was looking to the gears, when I heard another sound apart from the one that the gears were making. I wanted to turn my head, but since I could not do that, I kept looking ahead of me. I heard laughing, and suddenly my head moved and I felt myself looking into a face. I immediately knew that this person was not a puppet.

"You are right my dear puppet. I am a human or more exactly, a man. I'm not a puppet at all...or am I?" This question seemed to please the man well, because he chuckled and looked at me again. I wanted to answer the question he asked me, but he raised his hand and said: "There is no need to speak. You will speak when I let you, and in the mean time you stay silent, just like the other dolls. Understand?"

I felt the string that was attached to my head pull, and my head moved forward and I nodded to the man. The man grinded, and began to walk away. Without looking at me, he raised him hand and pointed his finger to me and then forward. "Come with me." My legs obeyed, and they began to move. One, two, one, two, step by step. Before I realized what was happening or what I was doing, I found myself walking after the man over the turning gears.

After a short while, where the man or me didn't speak (I figured out that he was the only one who could let me do that), we stood on a gear that was bigger than all the others in this place. On the gear, there stood a large wooden rectangle. On both the ends of it, there stood some strange shaped objects. They looked like a bunch of squares put together. One of my thoughts whispered: 'that wooden rectangle is a table, and that bunch of squares is called a chair.' The man saw me looking at the chairs and gestured his hand to them. "Have a seat. I have a lot of things to tell you and I don't have all day."

I felt my body being lifted off the gear and into the air. The strings of my body kept my body from falling to the ground, and they put me down in one of the chairs. The man placed himself in the other chair, put his hand under his chin and exclaimed to me with a piercing look.

I suddenly realized that I was able to move my body. I turned my head to the strings that hung now loose beside my body. A question was coming up inside my mind, and I felt myself being able to let it come out of my mouth.

"My strings. You control them?" My voice sounded calm and melancholic .

The man chuckled. "I control everything of you, my dear puppet. Your strings, your movements, your voice, even your thoughts are all controlled by me. But not only you. I control the other puppets too. I control every gear, turning or not. Every single thing of this place, I control. And ask me why?"

"Why do you control everything?" I asked like the man told me to do so.

"Because this place, this whole world, I created it myself! I have designed everything and I know everything about it. Nobody knows more of it than me and nobody has more control over it than me. That is why I have control over it, and since you are part of my world too, I also have control over you."

He laughed then: loud. He placed his head in his neck and laughed like he could not stop. It didn't sound like he was really enjoying himself, but I remanded silent. After a while, the man stopped laughing and looked at me again. "Enough of the fun. It is time I tell you about the things you need to know."

The man told me he was the one who created me. He was the one who shaped me into this form and gave me this appearance. He told me, that since he was the one who created me, he controlled my moves. I should listen to him and do what he says, otherwise I will be written out of the story, he told me. I don't know what that means, but since I have no own free will, I will listen to this man.

The man said that my name was Edel. Edel, because of the stones that were going to be part of my role. I didn't know what stones were, nor what the man meant by 'my role'. So I nodded and waited for what the man had to tell.

The man told me he was a writer. A writer of tragedies. I asked him what that was, a tragedy. He answered that a tragedy is a story with a sad ending, and that the characters of the story are all unhappy. When I asked him why he writes tragedies, he said it was fun for him to watch others suffer. The writer said it's good that people suffer. He said that it is bad for a person to be happy all the time and to only have happy thoughts and feelings. That a person also should experience feelings like pain, sadness and loneliness.

Happy, pain, sadness, loneliness... The writer called them feelings. I didn't know the word, and my thoughts (or was it the man's thoughts?) didn't explained it to me. I decided that I would try to say something again. I opened my mouth.

"What is happy? What is pain? What is sadness? What is loneliness?"

The writer was so surprised with my question that he fell with such force in his chair that it almost collapsed backwards. His eyes were wide open and his jaw was dropped. This pose lasted for 5 seconds. Then, the writer crumpled back in his chair and pointed a warning finger at me.

"My my, this is dangerous. Very dangerous! You should not have asked that question Edel! Those things that you named, those feelings, are not something that a puppet should know about. Puppet's don't have feelings, just like they don't have a heart. That is their role, and that is something you should not forget. It is dangerous, very dangerous not to know your role!"

"Feelings." I tasted the word with my wooden lips. It sounded light, soft and warm. I voiced the other new word that I heard. "Heart." It tasted different than the word 'feelings'. Stronger and...more powerful.

The writer had been rocking in his chair and was starring at me. When I said my last word, his expression became serious.

"Hearts are strange things. They can make a human so happy that even the hardest things can't put them down, but they can also make you so desperate that you want to take out your own heart to lose those painful feelings inside. A heart's responsibility is too big for a puppet, as if it would carry one, it would not be able to stand the power of it and it would make the puppet smash to pieces. That's why humans only have one, because their body is made of flesh and bones. A human's body is strong enough to carry a heart."

A grin spread across the writer's face and he laughed. "But that doesn't mean that they can stand the weight of carrying one! All the humans that I write about have a heart, but they can't stand the burden of it. They are all in pain, dealing with sadness, loneness, anger or any other feeling that there is. And when I notice how I can make those humans come together, I combine all those feelings of them into the perfect tragedy!"

The writer continued laughing his hollow laugh, but I didn't respond to his speech. I was thinking, and I think it was the first time that it were my own thoughts.

He told me that feelings are things that a puppet should not know about. He told me that puppets don't have feelings, nor a heart, because that is something that doesn't fit with the role that we have.

He told me that a heart is a strange thing, because it can bring happiness to humans, but also pain. He told me that the body of a puppet is not meant to carry a heart, because the power would be so big that the body would smash into pieces. The writer told me that only the human's body is strong enough to carry a heart, and that's why only humans can have one.

Then why do I think that I want one?

If I made any grammar or spelling mistakes, just let me know. Critics, flames and phraises are more than welcome. I hope you all enjoyed the story as much as I did. Thank you for reading, and please review! Bye!

~ Artemis