The Funky War P.4: Time Passed

At last, the finale to The Funky War... but the memory will still live on...

***

Following the moment we first met Cogsworth, we showed him everything. Seconds after Loki and Wanda left (again, for reasons unknown), Nessa and Elphaba returned from gathering more dental wax for Elphie's arm and they took to him immediately. Nessa's favorite movie at the moment is the live action Beauty and the Beast, so she wasn't afraid of Cogsworth's mysterious ticking noises or robotic voice, and Elphie was eager to get out of bed for once, so Nessa jumped at the idea of taking Cogsworth around the house. The older humans were both at work and She was at school, so the only one we had to worry about was She's little sister, who had been stayed home sick, and we hadn't seen her all day and assumed her to be asleep.
So we took Cogsworth out on a little adventure. The whole time, the Pocket-Sized Avengers were no where to be found, but I did bring Steve along to see what he thought of Cogsworth. The others who came on Elphie and Nessa's little expedition were the ones who had found him: Moana, Magneto, and I. The whole time, the Pocket-Sized Avengers were no where to be found, but I did bring Steve along to see what he thought of Cogsworth.
We had vanilla-cinnamon tea with milk and sugar in the kitchen, placed roses around his head in the living room ("Because roses are Beauty and the Beast and so is Cogsworth!" Nessa claimed. "He looks cute with them. Are you okay with this, Cogsworth?" He responded with a mechanical shrug.), and last but not least, everyone's favorite room of the house... the basement.
The humans had continued to do some work on it since adding the air hockey table during Christmas, including a fresh new layer of butternut-squash-colored paint and even cleaning up the craft room. When we entered, however, we saw that they had made more changes than they thought.
"Welcome to the basement, Cogsworth!" Nessa announced, dropping from my arms (I had carried her down the stairs) and spinning around, arms open wide, but then they flew to her mouth when she saw the new addition. "Woah! I didn't know we had a dartboard."

"I'll play you, lolo," Moana smirked Magneto's way. "But I've got to warn you. I think I'm pretty good at it."
Magneto beckoned Moana closer and whispered something into her ear, where she laughed and said, "Yeah, I guess you are, too."
Steve's arm brushed mine and the other motioned to the dartboard. "What say you, Elsa? Want to give it a go? Us against them?"
I chuckled softly. "Oh, I'm afraid I won't be very good."
"Me either. We can fail together."
"Alright, alright." I agreed, only to get distracted when I saw Cogsworth climbing the air hockey table with Elphie and Nessa.
"What are you guys doing?" I asked.
"Cogsworth wants to play air hockey. He says he's really good at it."
"Really? But how would he know...?" I started to say, but my voice trailed off whenever Cogsworth stared at me. Maybe that was a rude thing to say. My eyes flicked away, embarrassed and a little uncomfortable in his unblinking gaze.
While Steve and I played darts against Magneto and Moana's team, I paid more attention to Cogsworth's conversation than firing my darts.
"Do you. Come downstairs. Often?"
"Eh, not really," said Elphie, re-wrapping a bandage around her broken arm. "The stairs are too big for most of us, and it's cold and creepy."
"I'm a-fraid. Of the dark. Too."
Elphie cocked her head curiously.
"Yeah. It does get pretty dark down here at times. But it's not so bad when you're not alone."
"Why. Are there. So. Many of you?"
"You mean us dolls?" Elphie chortled. "I don't know. She's a collector. She doesn't know we're alive."
"She."
"Our human. We told you this already. But I don't think She is your human, since you were found in her sister's room."

"I don't know. I could be. She's."
"Where are you from, anyway, Cogsworth? You said you came in a box- you've got to know that's not very descriptive. Why are you here?"
Nessa slapped her sister's good arm. "Elphie! That's really rude! You don't just go around asking new dolls why they're here. You said it yourself. She's a collector. He's one of us."
"Is he really, though?" Elphie said, being tricky by speaking in a voice that only dolls, with smaller voices and better ears, could understand. "Look at him and tell me that he doesn't give you weird vibes."
"What was that." Cogsworth asked.
The whole room went quiet.
"Nothing, Cogsworth," Nessa stammered. "Now let's play hockey."
I turned back to the dart game. So far Steve and I were losing terribly- as I knew we would- but maybe now that they were gone talking over there I could actually get a dart to hit the board instead of the safety cork around it.
"Steve?" I whispered.
"Hm?" Steve had a dart held at the ready, but he paused long enough to hear me out.
"Do you think Cogsworth is a little... weird?"
"A little weirdness is good," Steve replied, tossing the dart and landing a double twenty. "I'm weird, you're weird- no offense- the fact that dolls can talk is weird, the fact that there was a secret society of Funko Pops living in this house and you fought them and never told me until now is a little weird."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know if it should be kept a secret or not. But now that Cogsworth's here... well, he's a little weird to me because I don't know where his loyalties lie. He is technically a Funko... but whenever we found him the others were treating him like he had a disease. But it's weird that he's spending time with us because you know how territorial the Funkos are. You would think they'd want Cogsworth on their team, with no chance of him leaving that room. Right?"
"I don't know much about the Funkos, but from what you've told me, yes, that does seem a little weird. It's your dart, by the way."

"It's like they don't accept Cogsworth as a Funko," I closed one eye and held the dart up vertically to the board, not aiming for anywhere in particular, but trying to act like I knew what I was doing. "It's like... it's like he's not even one of them." I closed both eyes and launched the dart.
"Are you kidding me?" Magneto cried. "Elsa got a bull's eye!"
I opened both eyes in disbelief. "I did?"
"You did," Moana said. "Nice shot. We're going to have to try twice as hard if we want to beat them now, lolo."
On the sidelines, Nessa and Cogsworth where playing air hockey one-on-one while Elphie operated the electronic scoreboard. Cogsworth was steering plastic "pusher" with his clock-arms and expertly swung the puck into Nessa's goal, like he himself had been playing the game since December. But that wasn't as unsettling as the way he stared at me while he did it.
Like I had found something out.

***

"This is suicide." Hawkeye muttered under baited breath. His callused fingers grazed the outside of the door soundlessly... feeling the divots and markings, both made my factory and by accident, and also feeling for any vibration of sounds behind it.
"Then make elf man do it," Wanda urged. "He's the one who was apparently able to talk some sense into them."
"Elf man?" I said incredulously.
Wanda shrugged. "You look like an elf. Only a little. And I've got nicknames for everybody."
I sighed and faced the door to She's sister's room again. I couldn't shake the reminder that She had also called me her little elf-man upon first finding me.
"Fine. I'll go in first. But if there's trouble, you guys follow." I stated.
"I'm the captain here. I call the shots. If we feel like interfering, we will." Said Hawkeye.
"Technically, Chris is the captain, but sure, whatever. You're the leader," Tony retaliated. "Goodbye, elf man." He waved at me in a very friendly way that did not suit the current situation at all.

I pushed on the door and it gave way very softly, and the Pocket-Sized Avengers crept soundlessly behind a doorframe that would serve as a potential blockade. Only Thor and Vision looked sympathetic, but I didn't feel like saying anything to them. What could be said, after all?

When I first entered, the Funkos were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they were hiding from someone or something. A human had stayed home sick that day, but so far she was no where to be seen.
"Hello? Is anybody in here? It's Loki, the one who negotiated with you earlier? I'm back." I was a little more than on edge.
Through the open crack in the door, my eyes connected with Hawkeye's, or at least I assumed were Hawkeye's eyes behind his ever-present purple-tinted glasses.
"I think they're planning an ambush." I mouthed.
Hawkeye groaned and brought the Avengers around into the room until they were a safe distance behind me, but at least they were behind me.
"We come in peace," Hawkeye barked. "We're here to ask about one of your terms."
Again, only silence. I began to think less and less that something was up and more and more that the Funkos were actually hiding themselves.
"It's okay. We're dolls." I tried.
That did the trick. The paranoid Funkos- a paranoia I didn't think warriors such as them could possess- returned began to slink out of the shadows. Their leader, the Ragnarok version of Thor who I had learned was named Blake from Elsa, the Ragnarok version of Heimdall, and an Iron Man in his standard suit crept out from under boxes, slid out of drawers, or rolled out from under She's sister's bed.
"Why where you hiding?" I asked, all formality gone at the sight of their state.
Blake stood and scanned the crowd I had brought but showed no sign of intimidation or aggression. Instead, he drew a humanesque figure in the air and then stretched both of his hands apart vertically.
"Ho boy. Does anybody speak Funko?" Tony asked, looking around at his peers and knowing nobody could comply.

"You said you wanted seven stones," I breathed. "What kind of stones did you mean?"
Blake shook his head side to side wildly, obviously a "no" unless you were in Greece, Albania, Egypt, Iran... the list went on and on. Beside Blake, their Iron Man character squinted and held his hands to his mouth, miming laughter.
"Okay, so obviously they don't want multiple rocks. Go figure." Said our own Iron Man.
Blake sent Heimdall down the side of the room past the bed where we could not see him, and when he returned, he was holding his non-sword hand into a fist. Upon Blake's command of snapping his fingers, Heimdall opened his hand and held out a flat silver disk for one of us to take.
"It's a battery." Hawkeye said immediately.
"It appears something was lost in translation," I commented. "Moana couldn't go back and forth word-for-word. Maybe the Funko word for 'stone' is the same for 'battery'."
"Fair enough, but then where are the batteries?"
Heimdall scratched his chin and signed something to Blake.
I held out an arm to stop any more of Hawkeye's questions. "Hold on. They're saying something."
Heimdall left the group again, this time taking a little longer than he had the last.
"No. They're getting something." Hawkeye's bow arm tensed in anticipation and possible preparation if the Funkos felt like turning hostile.
Meanwhile, Blake and Iron Man were trying to explain to us something by exchanging the gun, opening its compartments, flipping it around, trying to show us something.
"I think they're trying to say that the batteries charge the gun." Chris pointed out.
"Mm... maybe." Said Wanda.
Heimdall returned with another flat silver disk, this time on a light blue leather chain and buckle that could function as a human-sized bracelet. Whenever he turned the disk over, we all saw the face of a watch, the hands frozen eternally at 1:23. I drew the conclusion that the watch had been recently gutted for its batteries... batteries on the same type that Heimdall had showed us. But if that were really true, that left the question of where the gutted batteries had ended up.

"The watch means something," Said Chris. "They won't stop pointing at it."
"Well, duh it means something, Sherlock. The batteries are in the watch." Tony laughed.
"What you think you're a better Sherlock, than me?
"Yeah, actually."
"No. The watch is stopped, see? The second hand's not moving. Mind if I...?" Wanda said, not waiting for an answer as she took the watch from Heimdall's waiting hands. "I think they're trying to say the batteries they seek are in something like a watch elsewhere."
"Like a clock." Chris finished.
The pieces were all starting to connect for me, and rapidly so. "No, the only clocks in this house either connect to electricity or are too big for batteries as small as these. That means the thing that houses the batteries will need to be independent of charging cords and little enough to be run by these batteries."
"Tick-Tock." Wanda said suddenly.
Hawkeye was frustrated. "What?"
"Cogsworth."

***

"Are you kidding me? Elsa got a bull's eye?!" Magneto yelled in disbelief.
I too, couldn't believe it, but I was more impressed than angry. "You did! Nice shot," I looked down at Magneto, who was now at the height of my hips since he was standing on the couch block. What do the humans call those? Ottomans? I wonder if there could be a doll-sized ottoman because putting your feet up when you sit down seems very comfortable. "We're going to have to try twice as hard if we want to beat them now, lolo."

Magneto saw Elsa talking about something with Steve. He smiled secretly. "That shouldn't be too hard since they're distracted."
"Why?"
Magneto started whispering like Elsa and Steve were. "Cogsworth."

"What about him?"
"Everyone thinks he's strange. To be honest, it's difficult to blame them."
I lowered my voice. "Do you think so, too?"
Magneto didn't say anything, but he stared at me in a certain way so that I would know he did.
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"I don't think he's as weird as you all make him to be," I glanced over at the hockey table, where Cogsworth stood guarding his goal from Nessa. A puck came flying across the surface and he reached out and blocked it with an expertise he shouldn't have for being so new. "He's a nice clock. I like his curiosity. Just because he talks funny doesn't make him an enemy."
Magneto shot a dart and hit the thirteen. "It's not that. I can do something that nobody else can. Remember?"
It was my turn, so I hit and got closer to the center than he had. "Yeah." Magneto had the power to control metals, which I thought was pretty cool, but what I didn't think was cool was how he didn't want anyone else to know. It was like our own little secret. I liked that, but it made me wonder about some things I'd never asked him.
"Well, there's something else I can do along with that. I can sense metals inside of people."
My head turned around and around, looking for the metals I couldn't see. I guess Elsa and I had things inside of us to help us sing whenever our switches were on... could that be what he meant?
"This Cogsworth character... well... he's got more inside of him than you would like to know. More than what I'm comfortable with. So yeah. I understand why the other dolls find him creepy."
Both Magneto and I had run out of darts and Elsa and Steve weren't firing any of theirs anymore, so that was the end to our game. I pulled myself up onto the ottoman to join Magneto and my pets. I had been exactly right about the ottoman- it was like a couch our perfect size, though the human couches always looked softer.
"What do you sense in him?"
He grimaced like I didn't want to know the answer. "Stuff. Like... um... wires. Lots of those, and two miniature cameras. They aren't very good cameras, but they're there."

"Why cameras?" I asked, scratching Pua's bristly nose as he nudged his way into my lap.
"How should I know?"
"I don't know. You're the magnet man."
"Please don't call me that."
"Okay, what else?"
"Let's see... batteries. Seven of them."
"That's not so different. Elsa and I have batteries of our own, too."
"Not as many as he has." Magneto promised.
It frustrated me that he knew all of this stuff but still was uncomfortable telling it to me. What kind of dangers was he afraid of coming from this funky little clock?
"Well, I don't care what he has inside him. I like him."
"I'm trying to, too."
"Did the other Funko Pops have batteries and cameras and wire inside of them?"
Magneto thought for a second. "No. They didn't. Just the spring inside their necks that gives them their bobbleheads."
Hm. I began watching Cogsworth's game with Nessa, which she was failing horribly. Cogsworth didn't even have to see what he was doing anymore. Instead he was watching Elsa with an unblinking stare, which I found a little creepy even though I was trying not to.
Steve began to feel threatened for Elsa's sake. "Cogsworth? Is there something you want to say?" He asked, not rudely, but pointedly.
"They are. Coming." The mouthless clock whispered, but we couldn't hear him say that because the whirring of the things Magneto said he had inside of him were too loud. Instead, we only had to assume what he said once we heard the rumble of tiny footsteps coming from the ceiling.
"It's the Funkos," Magneto muttered. "They're coming down from upstairs."
"What should we do?" Elsa replied, wringing her hands.

"Run." Said Cogsworth, which we did hear. But why run? Wasn't he one of them? Hadn't we made peace with Blake and the others? Maybe they were only joining us for a friendly air hockey tournament. But I doubted so when we heard more and more footsteps. Definitely more than three pairs of them, all stomping towards us.
Steve took action and grabbed his shield off the peg in his back, which he put in front of himself, then put himself in front of Elsa. He shouted commands off left and right. He told Elsa to grab Nessa and Elphaba off the air hockey table, which she did, and the two little ornaments were snug under each of her arms. I'd realized they'd forgotten to get Cogsworth.
Ignoring Magneto, I ran over until I was right by the edge of the table and held my arms out above me like I was reaching out for a hug from a very tall doll. Cogsworth's face showed no panic like the others, but that didn't matter to me, because he was still a doll, and still a life worth saving.
"Jump, Cogsworth!" I called over Steve's voice. "I'll catch you!"
He looked hesitant, but not out of fear, before falling like a boulder and landing in my arms.
"Oof! You're heavy!" I exclaimed. I wondered if it was the extra batteries that gave him the weight.
"I am. Sorry."
"They're trying to ambush us!" Steve yelled. "Everybody, get out of here before we're surrounded!"
"But there's no exits!" Elsa squealed.
"Upstairs!" Steve pointed. "It's our only choice!"
We would only get there in time if we were fast. I could go fast enough, but with carrying a heavy Funko Pop clock? I would have to be even faster.
"You're coming, too, lolo." I said, and snatched Magneto off the ottoman and threw him on top of Cogsworth.
"Ouch! Hey!"

"I am. Sorry." Cogsworth said again, even though it wasn't his fault that I'd thrown Magneto.
"It's no use. We'll run into the others before we make it safely away." Magneto grumbled.
Inside I knew that this was true, but we had to try. I ran ahead of Steve, Elsa, Nessa and Elphaba and took the stairs one foot after another, going so quickly I feared that I might trip and drop both of my friends. Luckily, only the yellow roses Cogsworth had been wearing dropped, its dry petals leaving a trail behind us like some unhappy wedding.
"Moana!" Steve yelled from behind me. "If you get up there before we do, go outside! Go outside and shut the door! We'll be alright!"
"I can't leave you!" I shouted back.
"Yes, you can! You must!"
Magneto patted my arm softly. "They'll be okay. It's not them they want. It's Cogsworth."
"I hope you're right about all of this." I said, and willed my legs to go faster, but the steps were taller and my arms were weaker than I'd thought.
Finally, my feet felt flat ground, but the herd of angry footsteps were about to turn the corner and find me standing there with Cogsworth. I tried to put that out of my mind.
"Lolo, I'm going to throw you up to the back door. I want you to unlock it and I'll push it open. And then we'll run outside and hide somewhere. Okay?"
"Hide." Cogsworth said mechanically.
"Are you sure you want to do that, Moana?" Magneto grimaced.
"What do you mean? Just do it! We don't have time!" I put Magneto into my right hand while keeping Cogsworth in my left.
"Time." Said the little clock.
"I'm going to throw you now, okay? Get ready!"
Magneto held fast to my palm. "No, no, no, wait! Look outside before you do that!"
I blinked and blinked, it was so bright out there it was difficult to see past the glass of the door. Meanwhile, the footsteps got louder and faster. When I could see, all I saw was white, which was confusing, so I blinked some more before realizing that the white was not an error of my own eyes. The entire outdoors, deck to grass, was covered in inches and inches of thick white snow. My batteries buzzed inside me when I saw the wetness the snow could become.

I heard the herd behind us slow and knew that they were but a few feet away. I didn't have my oar or any open hands to use it with if I did. We were trapped. We were doomed.
"We're too late, Moana," Magneto sighed. "They're here."
I shoved him and Cogsworth into the same bundle again so they would be quiet. Turning around, I saw Loki and standing there and almost felt relieved until I saw the army behind him. The three Funkos; Blake, Heimdall, and Iron Man, and then the Pocket-Sized Avengers, the tiny heroes who I'd admired since the day we'd fought the Funkos.
"Don't be nervous, Moana," Loki said. "We're just here for the Funko."
Steve, Elsa, and the others made it up the stairs at that point. Steve saw me and his face fell. He knew it was over.
"Are the ornament sisters alright?" I asked, my mouth dry.
"Sisters." Said Cogsworth.
"Yes, they're both fine," Steve replied. "Loki? What's all this about?"
"It's a long story. But the Funky Warriors asked for seven stones to make up for the harm caused to them during our war. I- or we-," he gestured to the Pocket-Sized Avengers. "went back to see what they meant, and it turns out they weren't asking for stones at all. They need seven batteries. Seven batteries from him." He pointed to Cogsworth. I held him closer.
"You're not getting him." I insisted.
"Moana, we have to. He- he's not one of us."
"Of course he is! He's a doll, isn't he? Owned by She?"
"She." Said Cogsworth.
"Not She. Her younger sister. And there's something terribly off about the way Cogsworth is acting, not to mention materials such as battery packaging in She's sister's room."
Cogsworth began to squirm, but there was no way I was letting him go.
"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that, well, I hate to say it, honestly, but I think She's sister might have tampered with Cogsworth."
What?
"Check his back. There should be a covering there, like a panel. It doesn't look like it's painted on, does it?"
I turned Cogsworth around until he was facing downwards. I bit my lip. I didn't want to have to do this. "I'm sorry."
"I am. Sorry." Cogsworth said a third time. Whenever he said that, I had my palm pressed flat against the panel Loki said wasn't painted. Beneath it, I could feel the thing that had been making the whirring sound, and it ticked with every word he said.
"What's happened to him?"
"We don't know," Loki said, but he was pale. "What we do know is that batteries have been put inside of him, and they need to come out."
"I won't let you!" I cried, bending away from the group.
"Moana, it's not going to hurt him. It's just what has to done. For the good of everyone."
"But not for the good of him!"
Steve stepped in, catching on to what Loki was saying. "Moana, it makes sense. In some weird, demented way, this makes sense. The batteries explain why Cogsworth can speak unlike other Funkos. The batteries have been powering each of his functions from the start. What you see of him now is not the real doll underneath."
"Is this true, Cogsworth?" I asked, turning the little clock over again so that I could see into his eyes, but all I saw where circular black surfaces with something unnatural behind them, something inside.
"I am. Sorry."
So it was true. I wasn't sure if it was okay to feel hurt just then.
With Magneto still under one arm, I set Cogsworth down carefully until all four of his feet touched the floor.

When I had, Loki slowly approached him with his hands raised, but I didn't know why. Cogsworth wasn't some sort of animal, and the animals I knew wouldn't hurt anybody anyway.
"It's alright... we're just going to remove your batteries. That's all. It will reveal your true self. I promise."
"We promise." Steve cut in. It looked like he, too, was in on this now.
I excepted Cogsworth to scramble, as I would have, but instead he stood there calmly waiting. He did not squirm or fight Loki and Steve when they turned him over onto the rug. The rest of the group was quiet, but everyone was leaning forward to get a good view of the operation. But the Funkos got closer, gathering around their kin in a circle.
A tool with a pointed tip was passed from Loki to Steve, and he poked it into the miniature screws of Cogsworth's back and twisted away. I could do nothing but bite my lip and hold Magneto tightly.
"Mm mm-mm mmmm m m-m." Said Cogsworth with his face in the rug.
"What was that?" Said Steve. "We're not hurting you, are we?"
"Dolls can't feel pain." Loki answered for him, but he seemed doubtful of that.
Cogsworth pushed his face out of the carpet and Steve stopped his work. "I. Will not. Be here a long. Time."
"Ah, of course." Loki said because he expected that. Cogsworth only had a few things to say, and most of them were the same. Maybe that was part of his programming, but we wouldn't be able to know until his true self was revealed.
Once every tiny screw was gone, Steve lifted the panel from Cogsworth's back and laid it onto the rug before getting a good look at the mess before him. Everything inside of them was something I cannot understand nor describe. Maybe Bell would be able to if she were here, but she wasn't. Instead, it was up to us to unravel wires and poke around in his insides to find the seven batteries.
"How are you feeling, Cogsworth?" Steve asked, giving him a little tap with his boot while Loki dug in with his smaller hands.
"Mm mm-mm mmmm m m-m."

Loki pulled out the first battery and set it onto the floor delicately. Then the second, and the third, which were both linked to cameras. There was a flicker of either light or noise in there- it was difficult to tell- but it made me worry more than I already was.
"Can he see anything?" I whispered.
"Probably not, since he's buried facedown in the carpet." Loki responded.
So I didn't get my answer.
The fourth and fifth ones were linked as well, this time to a box with holes in it like a speaker. The same light-or-noise thing happened again.
"Can he speak?" I asked.
"Probably not, since he's buried facedown in the carpet." Loki sighed, frustrated that he wasn't working in silence.
No answer, there, yet, either.
"Aren't you nervous?" I asked Magneto only.
"Why should I be?" He said. "I was right all along. Everything I sensed in Cogsworth are the things I'm seeing now. I'm not lolo after all."
Then the sixth and seventh batteries were removed.
"Here you are. Take them." Loki stated, raking the batteries closer to Blake, who scooped them up delicately. I didn't know what he was going to do with them. Maybe he wouldn't do anything at all. It made me feel nice to think that they only wanted the batteries to save the real Cogsworth underneath all the machinery. But I wasn't sure of the truth.
"Turn him over." Loki ordered, and once Steve did, Cogsworth looked basically the same as he had before. His round black eyes were forever staring like usual, but this time no camera were behind them. He looked like an ordinary Funko now.
"Cogsworth?" Steve gave him another little kick with his boot. "We're done now. Are you alright?"
The others dolls, the Funkos, the Avengers, and the dolls from the Room She Lives In all held their breath.
Nothing happened.

"Cogsworth?" Steve nudged him again.
Only silence and stillness.
"Bring in Hawkeye and Vision," Loki demanded. "Come and see what's wrong with him."
Two of the Pocket-Sized Avengers came over, both males, one with brown hair, wearing purple and black, and one without any hair at all, wearing very bold colors like yellow and green.
"You assess him first." Said the one with brown hair to the one in bright colors.
The other one knelt down and pressed an open palm onto the space above Cogsworth's eyes and remained steady, not saying anything but keeping his own eyes closed.
"Vision. Your assessment." The brunet said.
Vision rose and opened his eyes, looking very forlorn. He turned to the brunet. "I'm not getting any sort of reading from him, Hawkeye."
Hawkeye's lips parted in shock. "By God," he said. "I think he's expired."

***

A funeral was held the very next day for Cogsworth.

If we had known the operation would have killed him- both parts of him- then we wouldn't have ever done it in the first place. But we thought we were helping him. We thought they were giving the Funkos what they wanted.

We thought wrong.

It hurt to talk about what happened, but we did, only mere hours after Cogsworth's failed battery extraction. The most likely theory was that Cogsworth was an experiment, or rather, a project, by somebody. No other Funko had what he had, but at least he shared something with the three Funky Warriors: a mission. Cogsworth was made to get the Funky Warriors to mind their own and stop interfering in the lives on the humans, mainly by making a mess of She's sister's room. The Funky Warriors wanted to put a stop to Cogsworth. At first I thought the batteries were needed to recharge Blake's gun, but that had not been the case since the gun was too small to fit batteries of that size. Blake had only showed us the compartment of his gun as an example. It was just another element lost in translation. The Funky Warriors had only really demanded the batteries because Cogsworth had been obviously programmed by a human, and as we knew, the Funkos had a lot to say against humans, if they could really speak at all.

After that, their missions collided, with Cogsworth trying to put a stop to the Funkos and the Funkos trying to put a stop to him. In the end, they both got what they wanted. Cogsworth, as we knew him, was gone, and the Funky Warriors swore to be peaceful because of the tragedy.

I don't know if that made things any happier, though.

The funeral was scheduled for a time all humans would be gone, and every doll that we ever knew was in attendance. Even those that had never met Cogsworth had showed up to pay their respects. Blake, Heimdall, and Iron Man stood beside him like they were the family, and maybe in some ways they were. Moana, too, was in the line for translation purposes, but I also think that it was for something else.

Moana seemed the most torn about about Cogsworth's expiration, and with good reason to be. If anyone had liked him unconditionally from the very beginning it had been her. I just couldn't believe it. First breaking Elphie's arm, and now this. The Funky War had not turned out to be a kind event for Moana, and I'd rather it had been unkind to me than anyone else. I could deal with the suffering, I told myself, as long as that meant the suffering would leave those I loved alone. But maybe that's just the true Elsa in me telling me that.

But perhaps, in some way, it was good that I had not been the only one to suffer. The funeral had brought everyone together, and even though I knew I shouldn't blame the Pocket-Sized Avengers for everything, the dolls seemed to have divided when they'd gotten here. We had a lunch afterwards, too, with things that we thought Cogsworth would have liked had his life been longer. Olaf and Idina went to work to make some Norwegian butter cookies together. I think it kept their minds off the sorrow, which is what everyone was trying to do. Anelle and Kristoff, too, continued to wear their caps and capes to shield themselves from the chill of death.
During the actual funeral, we weren't really sure what to do. Sadly, She and her family had been to a couple of them before, but they never liked to talk about them, so we weren't sure what to do. We had people come visit the Funkos and Moana, and then held a little ceremony where we all gathered in a congregation and had Loki say some words. He was pale the whole time- probably feeling extremely guilty about being the one who killed him, but none of us blamed him for that, because none of us knew the consequences.

The day after everything we were all still thinking of Cogsworth. We weren't really sure what to do with him after the fact, so we'd left him by the back door, a huge violation of the Code of Dolls, since he wasn't in She's sister's room, but we thought that he might enjoy the sun if he were still alive. But when we went down there the little clock was nowhere to be found, and that's when everyone started panicking. Nobody wanted to blame anybody, seeing as we had come to an armistice two days before, but of course the Funky Warriors were first target. The crisis was adverted when the humans came home and we all had to run back to our normal spots. Whenever everything was quiet again, a few of us sneaked outside the Room She Lives In, only to see She's little sister bring out Cogsworth from her own bedroom and place him on one of the shelves in the parlor, between two portraits of women with gray hair who looked similar to She. A wreath of yellow roses, the same roses which he had already worn, were hung around Cogsworth's head, and She's sister stood there a minute in front of him. We could not see her face, but we could feel the solace.
It was a beautiful sight.
And lastly, to conclude the Funky War series, I have prepared a Doll's Life File profile for Cogsworth as a eulogy.

Full Name: Cogsworth the clock
Finding Place: She's sister's room
Finding Date: March 19th, 2018
Species: Disney's live action Beauty and the Beast Cogsworth Funko Pop
Strengths: Patience, cool-headedness, curiousity
Weaknesses: Poor speech, unnerving stares, not very fast
Powers: Nothing of our knowledge
Status: A small life that made a large impact, and will be missed by all of us dolls