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Ragatha has been worried, lately. Well. That’s not entirely accurate: her worrying is not confined to time frames. It is not that she’s worried now, or was worried a while ago, or that she’s just now started to worry. It’s more like she’s always been worried, she always is worried and she’s probably never not going to worry. It’s just that she hasn’t ever worried about this before. It’s that the topic she’s worried about is new.
Or, rather: Pomni is new.
She’s brand new, still scared and confused and closed off. She’s shy, and terrified, and Ragatha understands, from the bottom of her heart: the circus is scary. It’s big, and loud, and overwhelming, and certainly not kind, so she wants to help. She’s trying to help, because she wishes she got more help than she did when it was her turn being new in the circus, and she’s nothing if she’s not trying to make the world better.
(Maybe not the world. The world is a lofty aspiration that she has no access to, right now. But maybe the Circus. Because, for all that it’s worth, that is her world. Currently. Temporarily. For the forseeable future.)
But—Pomni isn’t listening to her help. She’s not taking her seriously, she’s pushing her away and rolling her eyes, and ignoring her concerns and her worries and her care. And that’s all well and good, really, that’s Pomni’s right and her decision and she’s certainly able to make her own decisions, absolutely, she’s an adult and certainly not stupid, but—being ignored has always been a sore spot for Ragatha.
She has never taken to it well. It’s in her bones, she thinks: settled there at age four when her mother was too busy with work to talk to her or play with her or tuck her into bed. It has made its home in her spine, creeping through her marrow into her hands and her fingers and her toes. She is not capable of tolerating being brushed aside. She’s starting to suspect that she never will be. It seems like being a plush in the circus is more than just being “Ragatha”—she’s not taken seriously at all. Maybe if she were sharp, like Zooble, or breakable like Gangle, or solid like Kinger, she’d be real to them. And she knows she’s real (or, at least as real as any of them) and she doesn’t think they think she’s fake, but—maybe, if she were to take up more space, she’d be real-er. To them. To herself. To any of it.
So: it’s Pomni’s decision to get close to Jax. And it’s her right to make that decision, but—it’s still driving her a little insane, watching everything happen that she told her would happen. It feels a little like being Cassandra. She is speaking. She is speaking and it is the truth and people are hearing her and she is being ignored.
And: she knows Jax is not a bad person. She knows this because she knows him, or at least used to, and she knows that he is not evil or even malicious. But he’s hurt, and he doesn’t know how to process that, and so he hurts everyone else in his attempt to never, ever get hurt again. She knows that. Jax doesn’t, Ragatha thinks. Or, more likely: he knows and can’t fix it himself and won’t ask for help and so he gets hurt again and again and again.
So. He’s not a bad person. But Pomni isn’t either, and she’s going to get hurt. Is getting hurt.
This lends itself well to her current dilemma:
(Ragatha is paranoid. This is a fact of life and has been a fact of life since fish crawled out of the ocean and grew sharp teeth. She was paranoid in the time before the dinosaurs and she’ll be paranoid long after the asteroid that wipes out humanity hits and there’s no use in denying that at all. Ragatha is paranoid. Not in the way of stalkers or conspiracy or tin foil hats: she’s simpler than that. Her paranoia is softer: she cannot convince herself that she is a good person.)
Does she tell Pomni the Truth*?
(*: It is less of a Truth and more of a Context. She has not lied, she has not misled. She has withheld. Can it be a Truth if there is not a corresponding Lie?)
She could. It would be easy. She’d tell Zooble, first. Have a heart to heart in which she’d cry about it, give Zooble ammunition. She’d watch Jax wind them up, watch Zooble detonate the Bomb. She’d flinch, be appropriately reluctant, apologize apologize apologize —
It would work. She’s not going to do it. She doesn’t want to do it. It would be mean. She’s not going to do it, but every time Pomni smiles at him, every time he ribs and Pomni thinks he’s not fully serious, that he doesn’t mean it with his chest and his soul and his whole being, the thought crosses her mind with all the subtlety of a neon sign buzzing heavy around her temples. She’s not going to do it. It would work.
The Problem is that she doesn’t want to hurt anyone. The Problem, extended, is that people are already being hurt. Upon closer examination, this is the trolley problem, really. Here it is, contextualized:
The Trolley is the harm. It is currently set on the path towards Gangle and Pomni.
Ragatha is the switch. She can change this. She can Change This.
The second track is Jax. She doesn’t want it to be Jax.
The Problem, when spread out like this, is simple. There is a clear solution. The Moral and Good thing is to pull the lever, to spare Pomni and to spare Gangle and to minimize the hurt, to push it onto Jax. That is not the problem. The problem is that she loves him.
Ragatha doesn’t want to give him the hurt that he’s causing. He doesn’t need that, it won’t help. She doesn’t want to hurt him more, because she knows him and she knows that he is already hurt and hurting, and she knows that she has already done her fair share of hurting him.
(This makes her a bad person. She’s aware. It is keeping her up at night—not like they have a night, one that matters—but she loves him too much to hurt him more. The Moral and Good thing is to hurt one person to save two, but she can’t do it. So she’s a bad person, and she knows that he would do it to her in a heartbeat, and maybe that makes him a better person than her but all it does for sure is make her jealous. His actions do not need to be harmless.)
(And she’s not in love with him, romantically. She doesn’t want to kiss him or date him or do anything of that genre. She loves him the same way she loves learning new things and knitting and fruit in the summer; in the same way she loves most people. She’s not in love with him, it’s just that they’re the same person, really, with two different ways of being, and so she loves him because loving him is easier than loving herself. He’s like a brother, kind of, if having a brother was like looking into a mirror. They’re both hurt in the same ways, but she’s soft about it and he’s loud. That keeps her up at night, too.)
Really, Ragatha thinks, the only difference between her and Jax is that she’s a coward, and he’s not.
—
Like any other trolley problem, the track has been going for quite a long time. The day that the lever gets pulled is not the first opportunity for the lever to be pulled. It is not the most dramatic, or the best timing, or most thematic. It’s just the end of Zooble’s patience. There is nothing poetic about the timing or the setting or the cause.
This is a common habit of humanity. Ragatha would be the first to admit that she is very guilty of it, frequently. Humans—no matter if they look or feel human in this current, present moment—have this itch to make things pretty. They like things to have a meaning: for every little, awful thing to have a beautiful, poetic, cosmic reason. They like the blood to be justified and the death to be deserved and the hurt to be a means to an end.
It’s not. It never is. It doesn’t mean anything. The blood is not beautiful, the death is not meaningful, the hurt is not empowering or pretty or wanted. It is just blood and death and ruin. It is senseless and it is cruel. No amount of poetry—metaphor or simile or fable—will change that.
(And so, when she looks back on this day, The Day The Lever Gets Pulled, Ragatha will make it sound better than it is. She will justify it and minimize it and be okay with it for days/weeks/months/the circus equivalent of it all, and then it will catch up to her and she will never be able to be okay with it again. She will live with it until she thinks about it and then she will never be able to live with it again. She knows this. It is the way that she is. She forgets it every time she learns it, and rediscovers it violently four circus-months later. It’s no big deal, except for when it is.)
Like most end-of-the-worlds, it starts slowly. It has been building up in the peripherals of the circus for a while, a slow tension. It’s not noticeable, really, unless you pay particular attention to who Zooble’s glaring at and why.
It starts slowly, but it starts for Ragatha very quickly:
“Why don’t you ever do anything about that?” Zooble asks bluntly, when they and Kinger and Ragatha are stood on the sidelines watching Jax and Gangle and Pomni devolve. This is a brand new question for a very old scene, and so Ragatha blinks.
“Me?” she asks, startled, and when Zooble turns to stare at her directly, she stutters. “I mean—why would I be the one to do anything about it? It’s not like it, y’know, involves me—what would I do about it?”
Zooble rolls their eyes just like Ragatha knew they would, and she flinches. The answer is lacking in all of the usual ways: it’s a lie, a bad one, and too fast and too frantic to even pretend to be confused.
“I don’t get you,” they say like this is a personal insult. “You’ve been here for so long! You should know more than anyone, but you’re just so… timid! You refuse to help out in any way that actually matters; you make all this noise about being helpful and being good and being kind but you avoid anything that actually means anything.”
Ragatha blinks quickly, trying to absorb the accusations. She almost gets settled, almost gets her feet underneath her and the wind in her sails, but Zooble keeps going:
“It makes no sense! You act like you disagree with him, you avoid him and you say you don’t like what he’s doing, but you never, ever, interfere. Oh, sure, you’ll drop a hint, but you refuse to elaborate or say what you mean outright. And God anyone ask what you think because you’ll lie through your teeth, ‘oh everything’s fine! I think that’s a great idea! Don’t worry about me’! Do you think I’m stupid? I can tell you’re lying, and you won’t tell the truth.” Zooble isn’t yelling, really. Their voice is even. They aren’t calm, certainly, but they are focused. Composed. Their shoulders are shaking and their eyes are blazing with emotions that Ragatha couldn’t name if the exit to the Circus laid locked behind the answers, but they’re not yelling.
Ragatha might start, though, if she opens her mouth. So she doesn’t. She stands there, staring wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the rage that she could not have seen coming if she were Apollo himself, much less Cassandra.
Her silence isn’t enough.
“You know what I think, Ragatha? I think you’re a coward. I think you’re more afraid of the consequences of your actions than you believe in right and wrong. I think you’re a coward.”
The worst part about this is that they’re right. There’s nothing that they’re saying that Ragatha does not disagree with. It would be an infinitely easier conversation if Zooble were wrong or if Ragatha didn’t care or if there was any real defense to any of their words beyond “I am a bad and selfish person, and I love him.” As it stands, there’s no response that she could possibly give, but she reaches for one anyways, stuttering out broken nonsense syllables until she runs out of breath.
“Wow, Zooble,” a too-familiar voice drawls, and Ragatha realizes that Gangle and Pomni and Jax are no longer doing what they were doing and are instead staring straight at her. “Tell us how you really feel!”
Zooble realizes that they have an audience as Ragatha does and their eyes flicker with doubt. They hesitate, take a step back, and Ragatha understands, really, she does:
Zooble is a good person. Good, capital G: they are brave and strong and they have ideals that they care about. They have morals that they stick to and they stand up for what’s right and the fact that Ragatha doesn’t must be the most frustrating thing to them. She gets it. It’s the most frustrating thing to her, and she’s the one with the power to change it. But she’s a bad person, so it’s staying exactly the same.
Zooble shouldn’t have flinched, though, because that’s the equivalent of blood in the water for Jax, and his eyes somehow sharpen and widen at the same time. His smile stretches impossibly wide, and all Ragatha can think is that it looks so painful. His cheeks must hurt all the time.
“What?” he asks, dragging the word out like nails across a chalkboard. “Done already? You were just getting started, Zoobs! Come on, tell her how you really feel! You were really getting into it, don’t tell me you feel bad.”
For all of Jax’s flaws and shortcomings, his skill in reading people is not one of them. He is good at seeing what makes people tick, at finding threads and pulling. It’s a skill that she envies, sometimes. She only realizes weakpoints when she’s already elbow deep in them on accident. Not that it being accidental resolves her of guilt, but: she envies the choices that he has. He tilts his head, feigns shock, and aims—straight and unerring, unending and unstoppable—right where he knows it will hurt: “Or is it harder to be mean when you’ve got an audience?”
His trap is good. It’s obvious, really, but it’s also something Zooble can’t avoid falling for. They’re Good, reliably so, and Jax knows that. Zooble, being mean? Being a coward and a hypocrite? They won’t-can’t-would never walk away from that. And so:
Zooble stiffens. They elongate, mostly, getting taller and sharper and real-er. “Oh, I’m sorry, do you care about being mean now?”
They fall right in.
“Ah, Zooble, you wound me!” Jax says theatrically, falling familiarly over Ragatha’s shoulder. He’s serious just as fast as he was theatrical, smile falling away like it was never there. “Of course I don’t. But at least I don’t lie about it. I am an asshole of a genuine variety, unlike others I could name.”
The pressure is helpful. It’s always helpful. Convinces her that she’s real, in the way that anything is real; that she’s not an observer, silent, watching. Distantly, she thinks that she should probably thank him.
Zooble doesn’t respond, but Pomni, bless her, who’s been watching much in the same way that you’d watch a particularly aggressive match of amateur hour tennis, does.
“I would like to know,” she states quietly, “what you meant by that, Zooble.”
This is the thing that Ragatha feels they all tend to forget about Pomni: she’s smart. Not like Kinger, who tends to be more of an enclyclopedia than a person sometimes, but she’s analytical. She’s like Jax in that regard, a bit: strategic and always watching. She’s more cautious, usually, typically, which Ragatha has chalked up to the general cosmic/existential horror of the circus, but: she might just be like that. She seems in her element here, circling the water underneath the sharks.
(This is another trap, she realizes months later, when she sits and rots about what could have happened differently; what she could have done. This is Pomni putting the net into the river. This is her putting in the bait.)
“Well,” Zooble says, now looking a little bit like a defendant on trial for something that they definitely did but weren’t aware was illegal. “You haven’t seen it?”
(This is the fish finding the net. Taking the bait.)
Pomni shrugs, eyes pointing down. “I just got here. I don’t…”
“Except for Kinger. Ragatha’s been here the longest,” Zooble explains. “Would you guess? She knows the circus, she knows him—” they gesture sharply at the rabbit laying bodily over her “—better than any of us. And she does nothing. She’s a coward.”
“Why would she have to do anything?” Pomni asks blandly, and Zooble recoils.
“What?”
(This is Pomni, catching the fish.)
“It’s not her job to manage his behavior,” Pomni states like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Just because he’s being an asshole and she’s been here for a while… why would she be responsible for him? She’s not his mom.”
Both of them ignore Jax’s offended interjection at being called an asshole, but Ragatha steps halfheartedly on his foot as he opens his mouth to argue more and he—pauses.
“If you have the ability to stand up for other people, you should.” Zooble says. And that makes sense, because Zooble is a Good Person. “She’s not responsible for him, but she’s responsible for her and her actions. They were inseperable, you know, I know she could help. And she’s not doing anything, so she’s letting it happen. She’s a coward.”
Pomni and Jax look upsettingly on the same page about this, both of them opening their mouths to argue, to object:
(She loves them. She Loves Them. They’re arguing on her behalf, even though they’re wrong—she is a coward, that’s a Fact of Life much like evolution and the solar system and the sky being blue and the grass being green—they are on her side. Which is, admittedly, a little funny, considering they both gleefully hunted her down with guns not even a circus-week ago (and then, subsequently, hunted eachother down with guns, about two hours after that), but they like her enough to argue for her.)
((She doesn’t like herself enough to argue on her own behalf. How do they do it? Where do they find it, the Good to argue for? She’s not Good, she’s hardly even neutral; she’s a coward and she’s spineless and she’s too soft to be real in any real way. What do they see that she doesn’t? How can she find it?))
“It’s okay,” she says. The conversation stops. Her voice sounds tinny in her own ears. Something about the circus looks more plastic-y than it usually does. “They’re right.”
Objections are voiced, probably. She’s not listening.
“You’re right,” she repeats, still trying to get her feet underneath her. “I’m a coward. It’s not really up for debate. That’s just true.”
The conversation stops again. Jax leans more of himself onto her shoulder, across her back, and the plastic-y look doesn’t go away, but it’s—easier, to ignore. She’s here. She’s not real. She’s here, but fake, but here isn’t real, so her being not real doesn’t really matter. A bit like PEMDAS, right? Two fake things just mean it’s real on a different level.
“What?” Zooble says, sounding thoroughly confused. “I mean… yeah, that’s what I said, but like. What?”
“Zooble,” Gangle interjects for the first time. “Let’s take a walk.”
“Whuh?” Zooble manages, before they get forcefully dragged in a direction.
“Oh! Good idea, Gangle!” Kinger says cheerfully, seemingly remembering that he exists. “Let’s go to the Clue room! I call being Miss Scarlet this time!”
The remaining trio watch them leave. Nobody says anything for a long moment before Pomni does a slow turn on her heel to face them again.
They probably look ridiculous. She must be holding up his entire body weight at this point. It’s like he’s trying to condense them into one extra dysfunctional rabbit-doll shaped creature.
(She wouldn’t object to it. It would be closer to what she remembers, what she misses, just with being attached at the hip metaphorically turning into literally. Maybe her heart would be back in her chest if it had nowhere else to be.)
“So,” Pomni says, dragging the word out awkwardly. “I didn’t know you two were…”
She trails off. She must be searching for any word that could come close to describing the scene before her. She must find her vocabulary lacking, because she just ends up gesturing at them. Is there any other way to explain it?
“We usually aren’t!” Jax says, as sing-song as he is matter-of-fact. “Not since, y’know, the Incident.”
“What,” Pomni says, but she must be spending more time with him that Ragatha would have guessed because she’s not taken aback at all. “Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. You ate her on an adventure and she’s never recovered.”
“Ohhh, very creative! No.” Jax deadpans, and she can feel him shifting. Probably doing something incredibly stupid and/or offensive. She missed him, missed this, and she has no right to, this is the good thing and she’s the one who ruined it, but she’s mourning it anyways, always and forever.
“Damn. Did you like drown pathetically and now she can’t stand to be around you due to shame?”
Ragatha can’t help it. She giggles. It’s a short, breathless thing; barely half a snort, but it’s a reaction.
“No!”
“Set yourself on fire?”
“No…?”
“Set her on fire?”
“No. Well. Yes, but that was unrelated.”
“Multiple times,” she mutters. “Every chance he gets.”
Pomni snickers. “You gotta get him back at some point.”
“Mmm,” she says, feeling a little bit more here. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do not think about it,” Jax says, leaning fully over to look her in the eyes. “You still owe me for the paintballs, at least.”
“Deepfryer for paintballs?” she asks, halfway joking but it comes out too flat, really, and he tilts his head. Considers. She watches him remember the whole shitshow that adventure was, and flinch.
“Yeah, sure,” he says flippantly, then quiets. He goes to say something, she can tell, but he decides against it and goes to pull away. Again. Again, again, again, there’s always an again: she can’t take another again: he’ll pull further away, and she’ll still miss him and it’ll never end.
(When does knowing someone end? When do you stop seeing their face in every person or their figure in the corner of your eye? When do you stop thinking of them when you see their favorite color, when you hear a joke that they would have made? When do you stop turning to talk to a person who isn't there? When do you stop wanting: wanting to know them and how they’ve been and what they’ve seen and what they think?)
(And, more pressingly, when do you stop wanting to tell them about you? When does it sink in that you have no right to share anything with them? When do you stop trying?)
“I’m sorry,” she blurts, whirling to face him. He looks like she just shot him. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was so—”
He doesn’t run. She wouldn’t blame him if he did; she would, but she’s a coward, but he’s not, so he doesn’t run. But it’s a close thing, really, with the way he flinches and his eyes go wide-small the way they do when you’ve caught him off guard in a new and awful way. He looks like he would rather she just shoot him.
“Stop,” he says, off-centered in a way she hates seeing him be, and Ragatha should, but she is a bad person, and she’s selfish and she always has been, so she doesn’t.
“I was wrong,” she says, and it falls out like a prayer, breathless and guilty and true. “I was so wrong and so mean and it wasn’t your fault, it was never your fault and I’m so sorry, I—”
“Ragatha,” Jax says, and he’s starting to get frantic, she can tell, because it’s the same look in his eyes that she sees in the mirror in the hours where Caine turns the ambient lights off and everyone returns to their rooms and she’s alone in too many ways to ignore, because they’re the same fucking person as always, “stop talking.”
She does. She’ll hate herself for it tomorrow, but she’ll hate herself anyway, so she does. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and at some point they’ve separated enough that she can’t feel it like she could just minutes ago. She’s more upset by that than any reason could explain.
“Stop,” he repeats, despite the fact that she has already. She doesn’t blame him for that. She never knows when to stop, usually.
They stare at each other, locked in a stalemate. Checkmate, really: Ragatha will always lose in stalemates. There are very few things that frustrate her as much as not knowing why, or how, or what. In this case, how can she fix it? What can she do to fix this tangle of unwanted complexities that she forced them into?
She is guilty here of many things. Her tongue is sharp when it needs to be soft and soft when it needs to be sharp and she shouldn’t miss him, because he was awful to her, but she was awful to him right back. So maybe it cancels out. Maybe it can cancel out.
“It’s fine,” Jax says. “I’m over it.”
(Liar.)
(Liar. She knows he’s lying and he knows that she knows and he’s still lying and she can’t(/won’t/shouldn’t) stop him. What can she do? She is an unstoppable force and he’s immovable and she wishes, just for a moment, that she could move past him, around him, into a brand new her that wouldn’t be haunted by the things that they’ve both done and said and meant. But she won’t.)
“It isn’t,” Ragatha tells him. “You shouldn’t be.”