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A doll is meant to be light. Ragatha was light. Physically, of course - she was filled with cotton, after all - but she tried to keep things light as well. A light heart means a light presence. A dead weight drags everybody down.
Watching Pomni walk off with Jax, Ragatha’s heart sank so deep, she could have sworn her stuffing had turned to lead.
A twisting, burning, suffocating sensation moved glacially down Ragatha’s throat, pushed through her chest, and settled in a twisted depression within the pit of her stomach. Ragatha was no stranger to agony. She was accustomed to allowing fires to rage within her, letting them fill her guts with ash until she was too sick to take anymore, only to keep on going. Anything to avoid risking the flames spewing upon others.
So why? What was it about this time that was so horribly, egregiously unbearable? It was always better to swallow poison than to spread it.
‘Just think of something else,’ Ragatha thought. ‘Kittens, rainbows, horses - wait, no, now I just miss my horses! Get it together, just…’
Ragatha crossed her arms and squeezed herself as tightly as she could. She hunched over. Her breath quickened. The bile that festered within her was coming to a boil. Hot tears were stinging her good eye. She couldn’t escape how alone she was. Scanning around the tent, with everyone else gone, she-
Wait. Not everyone was gone.
A pillow fort stood nearby. An impenetrable fortress which kept despair at bay. Where maybe, if she was allowed to be selfish this one time, she could be safe for just this night.
“Knock knock,” Ragatha spoke at the obelisk of bedding. “Kinger? Are you in there right now?”
A rustling sound emanated from within the fortress in response. From the pillows emerged a cardboard tube, which had been bent in the middle to deny photons their passage. Ragatha leaned in so her mouth was right next to the tube.
“Mesothorax,” Ragatha whispered.
The tube retracted, and a disembodied hand came out in its place, pushing several pillows aside to allow entry. Ragatha carefully crawled inside, moving scrupulously as to not disturb the integrity of the structure.
“All good,” she told Kinger when she finished shimmying in.
Kinger moved all of the pillows back into place, sealing the fortress and banishing the light. The hand deployed for the task returned to him as he lowered his other hand, which had been covering his tightly-shut eyes. Opening them up, he saw a singular eye floating in the void, gazing at him expectantly.
“Oh, why, hello there,” Kinger greeted Ragatha. “Did you have some questions about how centipedes adapt to changes in temperature?”
Ragatha shuddered. “Uhm, not this time. I… I just needed to not be alone. I hope that’s okay, I just - I know I should be able to, but- but-”
The gentle touch of a floating hand on Ragatha’s shoulder stymied her rambling.
“You’re okay,” Kinger said. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
Stunned, Ragatha grounded herself by taking a deep breath. Okay. Alright. Talking about her feelings was allowed right now. Same as it had been every time she came here before; but of course, she could never know that it would be okay this time, nor the next.
“Thanks, Kinger,” she exhaled. Ragatha sat on the floor near him, pulling her knees up to her chest and getting comfortable. “I’m, um, having a hard time. Tonight, I mean. Usually I’m okay being with my thoughts at night, but it only took a few seconds this time for me to feel like I was… approaching an edge. Only approaching, though! Like, facing the direction of it. In the general vicinity. I’m not…”
Ragatha trailed off as she looked up at Kinger’s pale blue eyes, the only things which shone in the pitch-darkness. They were intently focused on her, and the glint in them betrayed patience and understanding. For being such a cold color, they radiated such warmth.
“Sorry,” Ragatha said.
“For what?”
“Oh, for not- Not being fully honest. With you, with myself.” Ragatha brought her legs in closer. “It’s not just this general sense of anxiety. It’s… It’s Pomni. And Jax.”
“Oh?” Kinger inquired. “What’s got you feelin’ feelings about them?”
Ragatha looked away from Kinger’s eyes, as she freed up a hand to trace nondescript shapes on the invisible floor.
“Well, with Pomni, she’s special, y’know?”
“Special how?”
“Well, she’s new. Obviously. And she’s been having such a hard time. I want to protect her, I guess? I want to see her smile.” Ragatha brought her knees right up to her face, muffling her own mouth. “And I want that to come from me, I think.”
Kinger cocked an eyebrow.
“Ragatha,” he said, “do you have a crush on Pomni?”
Ragatha coughed, caught completely off-guard by such a brazen question. “I- I don’t- What!” she guffawed. “That’d be, there’s no… God, was I that obvious?”
“Oh, yeah,” Kinger answered. “Sometimes in the light, I get mixed up and think you two are already dating.”
Ragatha had never been more thankful for the dark, as the heat in her face meant it was definitely hiding her beet-red countenance.
“Haha!” she laughed nervously. “I… I wish.”
Kinger had no mouth with which to grin, but the raising of his lower eyelids conveyed as much just as well.
“I’m happy to hear you’re finding love,” he said.
Hearing the word “love” nearly gave Ragatha a conniption, but she powered through it and let the butterflies within her take their time to wind down and rest. Maybe it was the nerves, or maybe her schoolgirl-like crush was just destroying her cognitive functions, but she even found herself giggling.
“Pomni is a very sweet person,” she mused. “When she feels comfortable, at least. I want her to be more comfortable, around me. I’d like to hear her laugh. See her smile, like I said. Feel her hands on mine. Doubt she’d feel the same about me, though. She doesn’t seem to want to have much to do with me. Don’t know why she ever would, either.”
Kinger placed his face atop his open palms, as if he had a chin to rest on them.
“Come on, there’s plenty about you to love,” Kinger encouraged Ragatha. “You’re a kind soul; supportive, sweet, and you’re sharp as a tack. You and her have that in common. Seems to me like you’re plenty compatible.”
“Well, that’s if I’m not too much of a burden to be around,” Ragatha retorted. “She’s seen me on the ground, needing help. When Kaufmo abstracted and messed me up. I was beyond saving, truly. All Pomni could do was run away.”
Kinger’s brow furrowed. What joy Ragatha was able to briefly bring to the surface, she had just as quickly swept back under the rug.
“She doesn’t want to be with me,” Ragatha concluded. “Certainly not in the way I want to be with her.”
“Pomni’s had a lot on her mind, being new here,” Kinger reminded her. “For what it’s worth, she probably hasn’t even considered the possibility of finding a romantic partner here.”
“Hmm. Maybe.” She sounded disaffected. “I sure hope so, with Jax apparently being all buddy-buddy with her.”
Kinger moved a little bit closer to Ragatha. “How does that make you feel?” he asked.
“I don’t like seeing them… together,” Ragatha admitted. “I’m worried about Pomni, that she’s going to end up like him. Liking him. Especially in that way. Just thinking about them dating makes me want to throw up.” Ragatha winced before collecting herself. “I've just, I’ve been trying to befriend her this whole time, and I thought maybe we were starting to have a little bit of a connection, but I feel like I’m invisible to her now that he’s started… I don’t know, getting into her head.”
“Pomni’s a capable person,” Kinger replied, “and she's got a good head on her shoulders. A really, really big one, too. Like, freakishly disproportionate.” Kinger chuckled. “She knows the right thing to do.”
“What, so the right thing to do is to be friends with Jax? Of all people, he deserves that more than me? I don’t think I would mind so much if it was with Gangle, or Zooble, or you…” Ragatha gestured towards Kinger, before remembering the futility of such actions. “...It’s, I try so hard. So hard. To be kind, to be easy . I look out for Pomni, and he throws her out of a moving truck. I tell her I- I tell her we care about her, he…” Ragatha threw her hands up, this time merely gesticulating for herself. “Everything he does, everything he is, and he gets rewarded?!”
Kinger took pause as he heard the exasperation in Ragatha’s voice. Clear frustration, shielding pure, helpless fear.
“Nobody’s owed friendship, and it’s not about who does and doesn't ‘deserve’ it,” he told her. “She just… sees a connection with him. And right now, she wants to pursue that, which is her right.”
Ragatha sighed. “I know, I know she doesn’t have to like me. But I really, really wish she did. Even just a little. Is it okay to want something like that?”
“Of course it is.”
“So why do I feel like such a bad person for being this way?”
“You're not a bad person. No matter how much you want to tell yourself otherwise. You may not see that in you, but I do.”
Ragatha bit her lower lip. A few sobs escaped her mouth, despite her best efforts to shove them back from whence they came.
“God, here I am getting choked up over a girl again. One that I barely know. Some things never change…”
Ragatha sniffled. For now there were no tears, but she couldn't deny the pressure mounting against the dam.
“Back home or in here,” she chuckled morosely, “I swear I’m cursed to be the only lesbian wherever I go.”
Kinger let things go quiet after that, save for the sound of Ragatha’s troubled breathing. He waited, giving her space to open the floodgates. But she did no such thing.
“...I don't know about that,” he eventually resumed the conversation, “but I know what it’s like to feel as if nobody understands you.”
Ragatha took in some air to interrupt a sob.
“You do?”
Kinger nodded, or at least his eyes moved up and down, as far as Ragatha could see.
“It’s true,” he replied. “I was always a pretty quiet kid. Back of the class, no friends at lunch. When I did try to talk to anyone, I'd go on about history and warfare and, later on, computers, until they’d get bored and annoyed and walk away.” Kinger scooched closer to Ragatha. “And I was okay with that, really. At least, I thought I was. Bullies were a problem, but I didn’t care about their opinions of me. The issue was, I would go home, and things’d be the same. I talk and talk about the things I love, and my parents & siblings, their eyes would just glaze over. It was like talking to a bunch of dolls- oh, uh, no offense.”
“None taken.”
Ragatha wasn’t sobbing anymore, and her breathing was getting steadier. A positive sign, Kinger noticed.
“Anyways, I was sad, but I didn’t understand why. Not until I met her.”
Ragatha perked up. “Queenie?”
Kinger nodded once more. “I got to college, and on my first day, she came up to me. Think she saw that I was alone. She asked me about the article I had clipped, it was by Dr. Kunle Olukotun. We talked about multi-threading and scalable parallelism for what must have been hours. Oh, I was over the moon. What I didn’t understand is why that same happiness came with a twinge of sadness. Turns out, when you find out what you’ve been missing, a part of you mourns all the time you lost feeling empty.”
“Huh,” was all Ragatha could reply with.
She sat in deliberation, processing the bittersweet anecdote. It was good to know she wasn’t alone in her loneliness, but she felt as though she could relate even beyond that. Ragatha had been putting out exactly what she had been looking for. Bids for connection. Wellness check-ins. And when Pomni walked up to her that one time and thanked her, with sheepish admiration in her gorgeous red-and-blue eyes, tucking back her beautiful hair telling Ragatha that she was…
Oh god, there were the tears. The thought of what she was missing had opened the floodgates. Starting with a few errant drops on Ragatha’s dress, her crying quickened as the sobbing returned. Not only could she not fight it anymore, she didn't want to.
“I- I know, she’ll probably never want to date me,” Ragatha bawled, “and she- and she may not even want to be my friend. But I, I just don’t want her to, to…” she choked on her words, pressure welling in her throat as the stream going down her face became hotter to the point of stinging, “...I just don’t want her to hate me.”
The doll was broken. Ragatha began to wail as she relinquished what remained of her composure. She leaned to the side, where her head met with Kinger’s shoulder. She buried her face into his robe, trying and failing to gasp out apologies for her messiness. Kinger put his hands around her.
“Go ahead, let it out,” he whispered.
Ragatha roared in anguish. The pressure she had held inside: the fire, the poison, whatever she wanted to call it, it had all congealed into this thick, heavy slurry of sorrow that lurched out of her as her ability to contain it evaporated. She could no longer form words, but she didn’t need them right now. She had what she needed to lighten the load, even if only for a little while.
Thus Ragatha cried and cried, gradually slumping closer to the ground until her head was resting on Kinger’s lap. He tenderly petted her head, and she slowly grew quieter and quieter. It did kick back up again at one point - when gratitude crossed her mind. When she considered that Kinger was here for her, to see her be weak, to be difficult, accepting her regardless. She was being everything that she had been taught it wasn’t okay to be, in the presence of others. Yet here she was, resting on the floor, surrounded by comforts. Feeling the calming strokes of fingers through her hair as Kinger hummed Hush, Little Baby.
“Is this okay?” Ragatha cried. “Is it okay if I stay here tonight, with you? I don't want to be alone.”
“Of course it’s okay, sweetheart,” Kinger assured her. “I can’t be here for you always, like I wish I could. But I’m here for you now.”
In that moment, Ragatha felt as though her cotton heart weighed enough to sink her to the bottom of the ocean. Yet, she felt light. For now, there was another set of hands to hold her up.