Chapter Text
1.
When Gloria opens the door and sees Ken (that Ken, the absolute disaster of a creature she grudgingly pitied at the end of it all), she shuts the door in his face even though she knows she’s going to end up letting him in.
He’s Barbie’s Ken, so Barbie has the right to decide whether or not she wants to see him, and she’s said, once or twice, that she’d be open to having him visit.
Gloria thinks that, in spite of everything, Barbie might miss him, which pisses her off on Barbie’s behalf until she remembers to look at it less from her perspective and more from the perspective of dolls in a topsy-turvy world.
She met Ken when he was having his very own existential crisis and also, considering the whole “Ken is me” revelation later on, apparently literally discovering the concept of personhood.
What he decided to do with that concept didn’t impress her, but it’s still more complicated than Ken just being a man about things, given what he was (or wasn’t) created to be and considering the reality that, back in Barbie Land, the Kens are apparently homeless by design (or lack thereof). Gloria wonders if that’s changed. Maybe she’ll ask him later, when, if, she hates him less, because none of her critical thinking stops her from slamming the door on him, resentful of the way he made Barbie cry and oh, right, how he literally almost destroyed one of the cornerstones of her life.
Because at her absolute worst, she had her Barbies to talk to, to play with even though she was too old for that, and Ken nearly screwed that all up.
So she thinks she’s allowed some sharp, bitter anger at Ken’s sudden intrusion into what’s becoming a pretty nice family life, because for the first time in a long time, things are okay at home, and now this bleach blond idiot is here to fuck that up.
Now this bleach blond idiot is knocking on the door way too loudly, and Gloria’s got her palm pressed against it and she’s taking deep breaths and sort of hearing him out just because there’s nothing better to do but try to pick an actual point out of all the nonsense he’s saying through the door.
(Incidentally, how did he even find her house? Did Barbie give him her address? How many dolls know where Gloria lives?)
“Okay, yeah, I, like, I get why you did that, and I compassion-ate with your, um, reservations, and I for real wasn’t gonna visit Barbie because boundaries, cross my heart and hope to discontinue myself, but now I kinda have to and like, I guess it’s also an opportunity to clear the air, which would be nice because the air is sooo unclear here, except that was a joke, I know it’s a metaphor and also what a metaphor is now, and I think the air is just, like…unclear here? Some truck cars have gray clouds that come from them and they smell awful! And I just mean sometimes I worry Barbie thinks I’m not sorry because I didn’t say the words verbally with my mouth, which would be a bummer, but I was still gonna exist with that until…a thing happened and now it’s really kind of…Weird Barbie says I’m having side effects, right? Of Barbie leaving. And she thinks that Barbie is probably the cure and…”
Ken suddenly goes completely silent. Gloria’s heart—which has steadily and completely against her will been growing more tender with every word out of Ken’s stupid mouth—drops. His voice does too, the next time he speaks, enough that Gloria has to strain to hear him.
“I know it’s not…the perfect thing. To come here because of a thing that’s happening to my body. Because even if I want to be good for Barbie I know I’m doing it for me, because I’m not nice enough to not try this if it could fix me. So…could you, like…pretty please open the door?”
Gloria exhales heavily. She opens the door.
This time, she lets Ken in.
2.
“What are you doing?” Gloria asks, exasperated, because of course the first thing she sees when she gets home from work is Ken in the living room with the jar of loose coins they usually keep on top of the piano Sasha never plays anymore in front of him and his mouth full.
Suspiciously full, considering the fact that he’s a doll who doesn’t eat.
She didn’t even know he was capable of putting things in his mouth. Barbie definitely wasn’t overly familiar with the concept when she first got here. But this is the second time Ken’s stayed with them in the real world, and he’s curious, and Gloria really shouldn’t be surprised that his curiosity is manifesting in a stupid way.
He’s ridiculous. Her life is ridiculous.
Ken gives her a close-lipped smile.
“Ken,” Gloria says, “what do you have in your mouth?”
Ken gives her an exaggeratedly innocent “who, me?” look. Gloria has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling thoughtlessly.
“Does it even taste like anything to you?” she asks.
Ken tilts his head inquisitively. The sunlight spilling through the window catches on his helmet of plastic hair and the receding patch of plastic on his forehead, making it gleam with a nauseating artificiality.
“The coins,” Gloria says flatly. “I’m talking about the coins you obviously have in your mouth that you’re going to spit out now.”
Ken glowers at her, and she raises her eyebrows in surprise. Is he going to…fight her on this, for some reason? Seriously? “Kenneth,” she says in a way that’s honestly way too similar to how she says “Sasha Maria” when Sasha’s being impossible. “Spit the coins out.”
In spite of the fact that Gloria knows that Ken’s name isn’t Kenneth so much as he was just named after a guy named Kenneth, and Ken must also know this—right?—he spits three pennies and two dimes out with, in Gloria’s opinion, way too much drama.
The coins are completely dry, exactly the same as they were when they went into his mouth. She’s not sure if anything would’ve happened at all if he’d straight-up swallowed them, but she’s not interested in finding out, and she’s not going to have someone swallowing coins in her house, grown man-doll or not.
Ken makes a face. “Those didn’t taste as shiny as they looked,” he says, sounding disappointed.
“How would something taste shiny?” Gloria grumbles to herself as Ken continues.
“Also, my name’s not Kenneth. Why’d you call me Kenneth?”
Well, Barbie’s name wasn’t Barbara, and then she became human, and…
(When Ken does become human, they let him pick his name like they let Barbie pick her name. He insists on just Ken. Kenneth is for dead people and for when Gloria’s annoyed with him, he says, and that’s that on that.)
Ken taps the smooth, flawless, peach-colored fingertips of his left hand against the plastic jar Gloria always tosses coins into as if she’ll ever think to use them again.
There’s a loud clicking sound—plastic against plastic. Ken flinches, pulling his hand back and pressing it to his chest as if he’s been burned.
Gloria’s stomach turns.
She tries not to think about the dolling too much, but the fact that Ken is back here, worse than he was the first time, isn’t promising.
Actually, it’s exactly what Barbie was afraid of.
Ken closes his eyes tightly, still clutching his hand to his chest, and then opens them, mumbling something to himself. Gloria can’t make it out.
“Ken?” she asks, confused, but he just shakes his head, opening his eyes wide and then closing them and mumbling again.
Gloria leans against the wall. She feels dizzy with wretched sympathy.
Last night, Barbie told her that Ken doesn’t know what it means to die. That he doesn’t get it.
Barbie didn’t suggest explaining it, but Gloria can see fear on Ken’s face right now, and she can see herself, clearly and horribly, in the future—the near future—asking him what it is he does know about death (for example: does he know that he is dying?) and what he thinks of it, because if he really doesn’t know, she has to tell him.
She can’t be certain if that’ll scare him more or less, but seeing him now, she’s not sure how blissful his ignorance is.
Fuck.
This is awful.
He doesn’t deserve to die like this.
He can’t die like this.
3.
Gloria has trouble sleeping. So does Fred. (Which means Sasha never stood a chance.)
Gloria wakes up in the middle of the night with an uneasy feeling in her stomach. Maybe it’s fear. It’s definitely fear. She feels hot and a little like she’s going to puke, but she swallows it down. The first impulse she has is to kick away her blanket and commence tossing and turning, but she glances over at Fred, whose face she can barely make out in the dark. It’s slack with sleep. He had a bad pain day and the fact that he’s so deeply asleep is kind of a miracle. She can’t chance waking him, so it looks like it’s time to hang out on the pull-out couch.
Carefully, silently, she shimmies out of bed, stepping lightly over to the chair where she threw the bathrobe Barbie gave her (it’s a rich pink color and she did not ask how expensive it was; Barbie would’ve just said something about her discount) even though there’s a hook on the door where it’s supposed to go, grabbing it and throwing it on. She ties the strap tightly around her waist.
She opens the door and then shuts it behind her as quietly as possible, padding over to the living room. She’ll watch TV with the sound down.
(When she was much younger, she’d wake up after uneasy dreams, sometimes feeling like shit depending on how bad things were going for her at the time, and she’d roll out of bed and walk, zombie-like, to the living room where they had the television.
Half the time, her dad was already there, sometimes dead asleep, sometimes not. The other half of the time, he’d walk in a few minutes to an hour later.
Gloria figured he was a bad sleeper like her. It took her years to realize that wasn’t the case, that he was just keeping her company.
She’d go curl up next to him on the couch, lean against him, and he’d wrap his arm around her shoulders and pull her close and they’d watch whatever he’d put on, which was always some TV channel that exclusively played shows that ended before the eighties.
Sometimes she’d laugh, and that would make him smile.
She misses his smile.)
The living room is dark, so she flicks on the light, and that’s when she notices she’s not alone.
She claps a hand over her mouth to keep from yelping in alarm.
Ken doesn’t look at her. He’s sitting on the floor, legs stretched out in front of him. His back is rigid, his shoulders completely even. He’s leaning forward a little, bending at the waist to look at his hands, which are still plastic-kissed around the edges.
What does it feel like? Gloria wants to ask, but somehow she already knows the answer.
It doesn’t feel like anything.
Nothing is ever anything, with Ken.
His expression, or what she can see of it, is one of vacant fascination, which is a total contradiction, but Gloria’s used to contradictions.
This is Ken’s third visit. He and Sasha spent most of the day hanging out. A couple of months ago, Gloria couldn’t have imagined thinking Ken was good for Sasha, but Gloria’s also used to changing her mind based on what’s in front of her. She doesn’t understand people who ignore reality when it’s plain to see just because it doesn’t fit their original worldview.
Ken is still staring at his hands, eerily unblinking.
Maybe Gloria can understand a little.
“Hey, Ken,” she says. Her voice comes out soft.
Ken’s head shoots up, and he turns his neck to look at her, angling it in a way that just barely edges past impossible.
“Hi Gloria,” he says. “I didn’t notice you come in.”
“Yeah, I figured,” she responds, walking over to the couch, grabbing the couple of throw blankets on it and tossing them on the floor for a moment.
Ken gasps a little, a pointless, dramatic sound, and rises awkwardly to his feet to pick up the blankets and hold them protectively in his arms.
Gloria eyes him, amused, as she pulls out the couch.
Ken’s eyes widen.
“It’s a bed,” he breathes out rapturously. “Woah.”
The reaction makes Gloria feel a pang of fondness. It’s very similar to the one Barbie had.
You’ll like it here, she wants to say. It’ll be okay. You won’t have to worry about your hands anymore.
She takes the blankets from his arms and dumps them on the couch, climbing on. She turns on the TV and, absently, flips to the first channel she can find with a show that’s in black and white and has a laugh track. She reclines against the couch, stretching her legs out.
She glances over at Ken, who looks a little confused, a little troubled, like he’s not sure what Gloria’s doing here or how to respond, like he thinks she might be kicking him out but is reluctant to leave.
She’s not kicking him out.
“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks.
Ken tilts his head to the side, a tiny sharp movement like a robotic bird. “Don’t need to anyway.”
“Yeah, but you sleep anyway.”
Ken shrugs. “Everyone does.”
“Do you like to sleep?”
“It’s a way to make things go by,” he says. Fair enough. “Sometimes it’s nice to not be there when things go by.”
“Do you dream?” she asks. She thinks she knows the answer, but she doesn’t assume.
Ken looks vaguely confused. “Like in the movies? No. It’s just dark and then you wake up and the day happens. Do you dream?”
“All humans do.”
Ken makes a face. “Can you choose what kind of dreams you have?”
“Most people don’t,” Gloria responds easily. “It doesn’t really work that way.”
The thought seems to make Ken uncomfortable. Gloria doesn’t have time to ask why before he’s trying to turn away.
Usually, Gloria would let him go. But when she came into the living room, he was just sitting there looking at his hands as though he was waiting to get them back even though it’s not that quick and not even close to as simple as it seems, and she says, “Hey.”
He turns back to her.
“Are you going to sleep?” she asks.
“I want to,” Ken says.
It’s not a yes.
Gloria imagines him in Barbie’s room in his stupid sleeping bag, still staring at his hands, a motionless doll until the day begins and he feels like he can exist.
“Come on,” she says to him in response to the sick pulse of rejection the thought makes her feel, gesturing to the other side of the pull-out couch. “There’s room for us both.”
Ken hesitates, eyeing the couch warily. Gloria has no idea what’s going through his head.
At first, she wasn’t really sure there was much of anything going through his head at all. By now, her suspicion is that there’s so much going on up there that it all kind of cancels itself out, leaving Ken with thoughts he can’t quite grasp and feelings he can’t quite place, stranded between two worlds, lost and afraid.
Gloria’s not sure if he realizes how scared he is, or if he just tries to ignore it.
Gloria gives him a reassuring half-smile.“It’s fine. I know I’m not Barbie, but you’re safe with me.”
There’s a long pause in response to her words. Ken stares at her, unblinking because his eyes never get dry, absent of moisture in the first place.
Gloria feels an inexplicable flush of embarrassment.
Then Ken gingerly inches forward, sitting on the corner of the bed.
There’s another extended silence, broken only by the laughter of a live studio audience from the 1960s.
Gloria would say something, but she thinks Ken is ramping up to speak, so she waits.
“It’s kind of weird,” Ken finally tells her, before hesitating.
Curious, she asks, “What’s kind of weird?”
She braces herself for the genuine chance that he’s going to say something borderline nonsensical like “rabbits” or “Real Housewives,” and then probably pair it with something that’ll make her question the meaning of life (God, it really is strangely like having a little kid again sometimes), but instead he informs her, “I do feel safe with you.”
He ducks his head when he says it, his voice getting weaker with every word.
Gloria’s heart does something between “clench” and “melt.” He really has no business being so sweet when he was acting like that the first time they sort of met.
She swallows and then clears her throat. “Why is that weird?”
“Because I’ve never felt unsafe before, that’s not a thing in Barbie Land, so I don’t know how I can feel different with you.”
Unconsciously, he runs plastic fingertips over a shrinking patch of plastic on his cheek, grimacing almost unnoticeably when he accidentally pushes the inflamed synthetic skin around it.
Gloria’s heart does something different now.
It breaks a little.
She doesn’t know how to tell him, “Oh, honey, you’re not safe there anymore and deep down you know it.”
Instead she says, voice light, “Yeah, I’m magic.”
Ken frowns deeply, looking at her with narrowed eyes.
Gloria smiles, and Ken smiles back.
“I know magic’s not a thing here,” Ken says, a note of triumph in his voice like Gloria was actually trying to trick him.
Gloria laughs a bit. “You got me.” Blinking away the sudden and almost overwhelming emotions this conversation has given her, she shifts on the pull-out couch and pats the other side. “Seriously, let’s watch some TV. It helps me fall asleep, maybe it’ll help you stop being conscious too.”
Ken nods, finally, scooting so that he’s actually on the other side of the bed instead of just sitting on its edge, leaving as much distance as possible between him and Gloria. He wriggles so that he can curl up facing the television, but settles after a moment into a stiff stillness that makes Gloria vaguely uncomfortable. He’s not even breathing. The only sign that he’s in some way alive are his slow, pointless blinks.
Gloria turns up the volume on the television just a little.
Ken closes his eyes, and, from one second to the next, he’s gone.
Gloria glances over him every once in a while, at his smooth, peaceful face, like a robot down for maintenance.
She doesn’t know when he started making her feel this ache in her chest, this pull towards him. Well, no reason to fight it. He’s going to become human anyway—sooner rather than later, considering the way the dolling is progressing.
She’s already thinking about when he’ll be here full-time. He’ll get a GED, swim lessons, a job, a life that’s not in limbo. Barbie will probably move out with him in tow, though the idea of that is so painfully uncomfortable that Gloria doesn’t dwell on it.
Ken’s body is uncovered, she notes absentmindedly after a moment, and she knows that she doesn’t have to consider that he might get chilly any more than she would for any other doll, sentient or not, but she used to tuck her toys into bed so that they wouldn’t get cold, and she drapes a throw blanket over him.
It’s one she got just the other day, because it was on sale and it’s light blue and that’s Ken’s favorite color.