Chapter Text
Jax appears in the circus the same way everyone does–with a pop of displaced air, a stumble over unfamiliar limbs, a small what the f*ck? that echoes so loud in the following silence he might as well have shouted it.
The group’s collective shock thaws in record time, spurred by his tripping of the censor and the bewildered expression broadcast from huge, skittish eyes.
They explain the no-swearing rule, which leads to the yes, this is a game conversation, and by the time everyone’s finished introducing themselves the new human’s face has settled between a muddied combination of confusion and dawning horror. Ragatha knows what it means before he voices his question, feels the slight wobble in his voice like a knife through her heart.
He sounds so young.
“My… name?” He stares forward at nothing, hand raking the side of his head as if to manually retrieve the memory. He flinches as he makes contact with the base of his ear, and his next words come an octave higher, nudged closer to the verge of panic by the discovery. “–I don’t…?”
“Totally normal!” Ragatha hurries to reassure him. Animal themed avatars were always tricky–they often fared above average on a functional level, but the privilege of two arms and two legs was hard to appreciate alongside their perceived loss of humanity. She can’t distract him from the looming existential crisis forever, but she could at least try to keep his mind off it for now. “None of us remember our names. Not our real ones, anyway. But that just means you get to pick a new one.”
“But if this is a game, how…?”
“Uh…” Ragatha glances towards the others, silently begging for help.
“Best not to think about it,” Ribbit interjects.
Kaufmo continues their game of distraction without breaking stride. He wastes no time setting off a round of cheesy name suggestions, starting with Thumper and Bugs and only getting progressively worse from there. It ends with the new guy tapping his foot against the ground in barely concealed annoyance. He isn’t panicking anymore. Ragatha counts it as a win.
“How about Roger?” Kinger suggests.
The new human squints at Kinger, annoyance giving way to confusion at the seemingly normal suggestion. He must be too young to understand the reference, Ragatha guesses.
“No, no, no. We can’t name the 7 foot purple rabbit some normie name like Roger," Ribbit says. "That’s like naming a baby Harold–it goes against nature.”
“Maybe we could give our new friend some time to think about it and come up with his own name?”
Ribbit blows a raspberry, both thumbs turned down.
“Aw, come on Raggy. We can’t do that–the name game is always a group project. Where’s your sense of tradition?”
Ragatha doesn’t answer. She thinks about her own reception to the Circus, the name chosen for her not by a group of fellow humans but by an AI pulling a slip of paper from his hat like a party trick. A name that spent more time being forgotten than spoken, at least until the next human came along with a mind not yet hollowed out by loneliness.
They hadn’t decided their name by group vote either, now that she thinks about it, so their argument doesn’t make all that much sense. Kinger hadn’t been present enough to have any input at the time. Ragatha chose Ribbit’s name all on her own.
“Wait! I’ve got it,” Ribbit declares.
Ragatha watches the new human’s face shift into something thoughtful as Ribbit announces their suggestion.
“Jax?” he repeats. “What kind of name is that?”
“Uh, a super cool and masculine one,” Ribbit fires back.
“Oh!” Kaufmo perks up, eyes shining. “Haha, I get it! Jax. Like jack-rabbit.”
The newcomer’s face screws up with distaste. “Seriously? A pun?”
“It’s not a pun, it’s a…” Ribbit waves their hand in a circle, trying to coax the word they’re looking for from thin air. They glance to Kaufmo for help.
“An Easter egg?” Kaufmo suggests, half shrugging.
“Close enough!” Ribbit pounds a fist against their open palm, “it’s got subtlety. Short, punchy, kinda normal sounding but also kinda… different, you know?”
Ribbit gestures around them, at the too-bright colors of the circus, to the odd collection of characters standing beside them.
“Jax,” their newest member repeats, trying it out for himself. His brow furrows as he considers his potential new moniker.
“I think it’s perfect,“ Ribbit’s smile glows with an earnestness Ragatha has spent countless nights trying to emulate. There was something fundamental to her design, something about the burlap skin or the too-flat mouth or the button eye, that made all of her attempts veer sideways.
Ragatha could smile at people, but Ribbit made them feel it.
The new human appraises each of them, a guarded edge to his eyes. His posture suggests nonchalance, but Ragatha watches the way his shoulders creep higher in the silence, bracing for something. His gaze flits around the group. When it’s Ragatha’s turn she offers him her warmest, most welcoming attempt at a smile–the one she saved for times like these, for frightened new humans and first impressions and a looming truth so crushing all the kindness in the world couldn’t soften the blow.
His attention lingers on her for a fraction of a second longer than it had on the others before it shifts, leaving her behind.
“I guess it’s not the worst,” Jax allows, a small smile creeping onto his face as his gaze returns to the person responsible for the suggestion. “At least my name won’t be Ribbit.”
Ribbit’s face lights up.
Ragatha bears witness to the resulting back and forth, the relentless teasing that stretches on through Caine’s grand entrance and Jax’s entire first adventure and right through the middle of dinner, too. It ends with both of them sitting on either side of Kinger at the dining table, taking turns sneaking increasingly obvious quantities of food onto his plate when he isn’t looking and breaking into giggling fits every time Kinger resumes eating, oblivious to their interference.
Ragatha prods the low-poly spaghetti around her plate, unable to keep herself from stealing glances of what might have been. Jax was settling in well. Could her own transition into circus life have gone the same if she’d had someone like Ribbit to ease her into it?
Ragatha is happy for him. She is. But between the laughter and the wisecracks, in the subtle tension in his shoulders and the glances that linger too long on his own hands, Ragatha sees the hint of something beyond the radical acceptance.
The others are nervous, too. Jax’s orientation to the circus hangs over their heads, unfinished. He has all the normal reactions, squinting against the eyestrain environments, questioning the strangeness of his new body, the bizarre plot of his first adventure and the blandness of the food on his plate. The typical script unfolds the way it always does, and Jax dutifully asks all the right questions.
All except for one.
Ragatha wonders if he simply hasn’t realised. If the shock of everything hasn’t allowed rational thought to catch up yet. To allow himself to ask the most important question, the one everyone else is waiting for and dreading answering in equal measure. No one dares to bring it up first. Jax doesn’t ask it. They all wait for the hammer to fall.
Dinner ends. Kaufmo and Ribbit offer to help Jax find his new room, and he smiles, turning in his seat as if to follow.
And then he doesn’t.
Kinger’s already retired to his fort for the night, and Ribbit and Kaufmo have their backs turned, leaving Ragatha as the only witness when it finally happens.
Across the table, Jax raises a hand to the side of his head and grasps at nothing.
He freezes. Ragatha does too.
She watches as he prods against the flesh at the side of his face, fingers ghosting along the fur to the back of his head. Ragatha knows exactly what he’s searching for.
None of them will ever find it.
Jax lowers his hand to his lap for examination. He stares, and Ragatha stares, trying to parse some hint of emotion from him. To guess at what direction his reaction to the news of forever was going to go, to brace for it and soften the blow, even by some infinitesimal amount, if she can.
But Jax doesn’t react.
His eyes meet hers across the table. His pupils shrink, swallowed by pools of liquid amber.
“...Jax?”
She says it softly. Quiet enough that the others can’t overhear. Jax jolts as if she’d slapped him.
“What?”
She purses her lips. Waits for him to make the connections on his own, for the questions and the denial and the bargaining she’s heard from so many others.
Jax swallows. He rises from his seat, shoves shaking hands so deep into his pockets it leaves his shoulders slumped. His eyes trail towards Ribbit and Kaufmo, who’ve already begun their slow meander down the hall. Ribbit turns then, finally noticing he hadn’t followed as planned. They give him a wave, beckoning him over.
“Dude, you coming?”
Jax mirrors their smile. It suffers the same falseness as hers do, only worse. His mouth forms the right shape and his eyes turn to half-crescents from the stretch of it, but there’s nothing real in it. Not even a trace.
Jax glances at her from the corner of his eye.
“Guess I’ll see you around?”
Ragatha blinks. This isn’t how it goes. Her regular responses–the gentle reassurances and platitudes, a hint of a white lie, an assurance that they hadn’t found an exit yet–all fail her in that moment.
Jax watches her in silence, waiting for an answer. Looking for all the world like he’d just asked her for directions to the bus stop instead of a question that would define the trajectory of his existence.
“Y-yes,” Ragatha manages to say. Because he will. They’ll be seeing each other around, all the time, for the rest of their lives.
Jax nods.
“Later, then.”
Later comes the next morning, at the main stage. Ragatha isn’t the first to arrive.
“Jax?”
He’s sitting with his legs dangling over the edge. He kicks them idly, hands planted on the stage floor at his sides.
Jax glances over his shoulder at her approach. In contrast to the pinpricks of last evening, his eyes appear more black than gold. Ragatha sees her own reflection in them and can’t help but look away.
When he offers no further acknowledgement, Ragatha picks what she hopes is a respectful distance and takes a seat beside him, smoothing down the creases in her skirt for something else to focus on.
“You’re up early.”
Ragatha’s used to being the only early riser. Her mornings were typically a solitary affair, but maybe they didn’t have to be. If Jax was like her, if they got along enough…
“Didn’t they tell you? Sleeping’s optional.”
Ah.
“You still should.” This is a familiar spiel. Everyone ended up grappling with the less-than-human nature of their avatars at some point, whether it was the sleep thing or the not needing oxygen thing or, in one of the more ugly cases, the inability to die. Jax had caught on earlier than most. Maybe that was a good sign. “We may not need to sleep, but it’ll still help. It’s nice to keep a bit of a routine, where we can.”
Jax snorts, “pass.”
Maybe it wasn’t.
She continues, a tad indignant. “People aren’t made to keep going all the time. Our bodies may not need to rest, but our minds certainly do.”
Jax’s smile falters. His eyes shift to watch her from his periphery.
“People?”
There’s a challenge in his tone, which Ragatha was expecting, but the subject he’s decided to debate her on doesn’t make sense. He’s supposed to deny needing rest. She has a mental list of bullet points and at least five different anecdotes to back up her claims. But questioning something as simple as her use of the word people?
“Uh, sorry, but–” Ragatha swallows down her nerves, forcing her fidgeting hands to still in her lap. She smooths a thumb over the backs of her conjoined fingers, frowning. “I’m not sure I understand the question?”
“Nevermind,” he shifts beside her. Ragatha steals a glance and finds he’s turned away from her again, staring up at the canopy of the circus tent. “It wasn’t a very good one.”
“Oh. Alright, then.”
Background music drones from somewhere distant. Two tracks play all the way through before either of them find their voice again.
“So. Rest, huh?” Jax’s eyes find hers again. “What’s the deal with the bedrooms, anyway? Are they just… like that? Or is this some hazing thing?”
“What deal?” Ragatha asks. “Hazing?”
“Yeah…” Jax huffs out a breath. “Why are they… Y’know. Like that?”
Ragatha doesn’t know. She tries her best to answer anyway.
“Caine makes them for us,” Ragatha explains. “He tries to match our preferences as best he can, but… the result isn’t always perfect.”
She thinks of the framed photograph above her vanity. The one that reappears each morning, no matter where she hides it or how she tries destroying it. The portrait of a faceless woman and her daughter. Ragatha can never make out the older woman’s face, but she feels the sensation of a hand on her shoulder each time she looks at it, the dull ache of ghostly fingers digging against long-healed bruises.
“Is something wrong with your room?”
“No,” Jax says quickly.
Ragatha frowns. It was rude to assume. They’d only met a day ago, she hardly knows Jax at all. Still. Stranger or not, Ragatha knows a lie when she hears it.
“Hey. I know this is… a pretty huge adjustment,” Ragatha tries. “New name, new body… it’s a lot. But it won’t always be this overwhelming. I’m sure you’ll start feeling more like yourself in no time.”
“It’s not that–I’m plenty adjusted,” Jax says, exasperated. He stares a hole through the floor, arms curling around his middle as if to hold himself back. Some of the hurt spills through despite his efforts. “I just… it’s not fair, y’know?”
She does know. She’s seen it over and over again, in herself and others. Lives cut short, families left behind, stolen goodbyes. Each new human brought their own share of not fair to this world. Sometimes Ragatha wonders if there’s a limit. If she’ll ever stop learning new ways the Circus could take from people.
“I was out of there. I finally…” he stares at his hands, clenches them. “And for what? What was the point of all that? I got out! And now I’m just… stuck here? Forever? What kind of bullsh*t is that?”
Jax flinches at the swear, hand raising to trace the edge of his mouth. He gives a bitter laugh.
“I just… I dunno,” Jax turns, eyes meeting hers. “Do you ever feel like you were sent here to be the punchline?”
“Here? You mean in the circus?”
“No,” Jax draws his knees to his chest, propping his chin on them. “Just, like… in general, I guess.”
“Sometimes,” Ragatha says quietly.
Jax hums a mournful sound against his knees.
It’s day two, Ragatha realises. Not two hundred. He hasn’t even cracked double digits. Jax has been here less than twenty four hours. If he’s already talking like someone who’s been here for years, what did that mean for him?
“Er–but! There’s no use dwelling on stuff like that,” Ragatha says, forcing herself to sound optimistic despite the tragedy unfolding in front of her in slow motion. “Remember how fun yesterday’s adventure was? Maybe Caine will surprise us with something even better to help you keep your mind off things!”
Jax gives her an odd look. He squints as if trying to peer through her, or perhaps beneath her burlap skin. His mouth tugs into a frown, annoyed and off-put and maybe the tiniest bit disgusted at something.
For a moment, Ragatha thinks he’s going to say something. He takes a breath and holds it, eyes searching hers, teetering on the verge of a question.
It never comes.
Jax averts his gaze. He wraps his arms tighter around his knees, minimising himself, trying to force his body to take up less room than its physical constraints demanded. His ears twitch and fall back to rest against the nape of his neck.
Physically, Jax is taller than her by quite a bit. Ragatha isn’t sure she’s ever seen anyone look so small.
“Eh, who am I kidding?” he mutters, voice low. “Probably would’ve ended up dead in a ditch out there, anyway.”
Oh.
“I’m sorry, Jax,” Ragatha says. “I…I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but… everything’s going to be okay.”
He looks at her, confused and scared and just the tiniest bit hopeful. Like he doesn’t understand the words. Like he desperately wants to believe them, even then.
“If you say so,” he says.
“Whoa, you guys trauma bonding without me? No fair.”
They both turn. Ribbit smiles and takes a seat at Jax’s other side.
“I tried to warn ya,” Ribbit says, leaning forward to meet Ragatha’s gaze. “Ragatha has this whole mother hen thing going on. She can sniff out newbie distress from a mile out.”
“I wasn’t distressed,” Jax insists.
Ribbit holds up their hands in defence, “my bad. My foreboding aura tends to have that effect on people.”
Jax jabs them in the ribs with his elbow, and Ribbit chuckles, shoving him away.
“Hey!”
The pair continue their playful bickering. Ragatha’s chest aches anew. There’s a moment where Ribbit’s eyes meet hers, and Ragatha quietly excuses herself, unable to stomach the question she sees in them.
“You two seem to be getting along,” she comments later that night, during the walk back to their rooms. Ribbit and Ragatha were the first to head back for the night, so the hall is otherwise empty. It’s the first moment of privacy they’ve shared since Jax’s arrival. Ragatha has been trying to avoid it, but her efforts to retreat quietly to her room unnoticed had been interrupted when Ribbit excused herself to follow.
Ribbit hums. Her eyes linger on Jax’s portrait as they pass.
“I want to squish him,” she announces, sighing wistfully. “Or maybe pick him up and put him in my pocket and carry him around all day, like a baby kangaroo. You know what I mean?”
Ragatha isn’t sure how to respond to that. She laughs despite herself, bewildered.
“Not at all.”
“Hm,” Ribbit says. “I think I’ll keep him.”
“Oh,” Ragatha says. There’s a lot more she should say. Like how she’s happy to see Ribbit happy, or how nice it is she’s finally found someone who not only understood her boisterous energy but served it back, tenfold. Given enough time to prepare, Ragatha would have said something supportive. Instead, without thinking, she says;
“I hope you can.”
Ragatha freezes as her own words echo back. She turns and catches the last of Ribbit’s smile as it fades. Her eyes stare straight ahead for a moment before flicking to Ragatha’s, wide and glassy.
“Ribbit, I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“You don’t think he’ll last?”
Ragatha shakes her head. She raises her hands as if to offer comfort, but makes no move to close the distance between them.
“No, no–I mean, yes? I, uh–oh, jeez. This is morbid. I don’t really have an opinion, and it’s really not my place…”
Ribbit’s eyes grow duller with every word.
“You’re lying.”
Ragatha takes a deep breath. She runs a hand through her hair, tugging harshly at the strands at the crown of her head.
“Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Liar,” Ribbit insists. There’s a frustration in the undertone of her voice, buried within the anticipatory grief. “I knew we shouldn’t have waited. How’d he take it?”
“What?”
“He can’t leave, Ragatha,” Ribbit casts their arm sideways, gesturing back down the hall, towards the main stage. “Do you think I didn’t notice how rattled he looked earlier? You broke the news to him, didn’t you?”
“I…” Ragatha frowns. That isn’t exactly what happened, but Ribbit was at least right about Jax knowing. “He took it okay. I think.”
“You think?”
“Better than any of us.”
She doesn’t explain how he’d figured it out for himself a whole 12 hours earlier than Ribbit thinks he did. How Jax had shut down, retreating inwards instead of reaching out to her or any of the others for comfort in the face of forever. It feels secret. Ruinous. She’s sure Jax wouldn’t want Ribbit to know, and Ribbit wouldn’t take it well, if they did.
Ribbit didn’t understand. Ragatha doesn’t, either–not really. But she and Ribbit were both tainted by the same prejudices. They’d endured the circus at its most empty, and now that they weren’t alone together, now that company and camaraderie and reaching out for help were options, intentional isolation felt as drastic as self-immolation.
Different people coped differently. Maybe Jax was doing better than any of them. Maybe his attempted withdrawal from the situation looked worse from the outside than it really was–who was to say he hadn’t found a way to come to terms with the news on his own? Jax didn’t seem the type to ponder the deeper meanings of life, but looks could be deceiving–in the circus more so than most.
“He’ll last,” Ragatha promises. “I’ll help you keep an eye on him, alright?”
Ribbit’s expression relaxes into a quiet determination. The smile she turns on Ragatha rings hollow, lacking any of the light it held when Jax was the recipient. Ragatha appreciates the effort, regardless.
“Poor thing,” Ribbit sighs. “Now he really has no chance.”
For the second time in as many months, Ragatha opens her bedroom door to find the hallway in ruins. She knows what she’ll see before she opens it. The synthetic screeching of an Abstraction was unmistakable, even in the clutches of sleep. By the time she’d jolted out of bed and stumbled into the hall, the creature was gone.
Ragatha’s stomach plummets through the floor.
Her first (awful, selfish) thought is please, don’t be Kinger. It always is–he’s the oldest, the most susceptible, her only constant in a place with none. She’s rushing to the main foyer when someone catches her arm.
Kaufmo keeps her steady as her knees threaten to give out below her.
“Hey, easy–”
“Who?” Ragatha demands. “Who is it?”
They’d lost another one. There’s only four of them left. Four in a hall meant for dozens.
She’d seen what it was like with only three. Three real people in a circus built for many more. Her weeks spent alone with Kinger were hard, sure. But the years between the arrivals of the third and fourth members of the circus were a nightmare Ragatha was determined never to revisit. An emptiness so long and suffocating she couldn’t keep herself from trying to fill it, babbling meaningless words and reassurances she didn’t believe so often she’d driven a permanent wedge between herself and the only other sane person in their whole world—
Four. Four wasn’t three. It wasn’t. But how long until it was? If Ragatha can’t protect them, if she can’t find a way to keep them here, then…
“Kinger’s safe,” Kaufmo says. “I was–We were…”
He stares down at his hands, smeared in dark mud. His knees are green with grass stains.
Kaufmo shakes his head.
“–nevermind. It’s not him.”
“Then who—?”
And in that horrifying moment, Ragatha realises she doesn’t know.
She’s played this guessing game before. Except she isn’t usually guessing. Never has the correct answer been so impossible to distinguish from the other possibilities.
She hasn’t seen Ribbit in more than a week. She hasn’t attended an adventure in much longer.
And Jax…
She pictures the emptiness in his eyes, the strain in his grin he thinks she doesn’t see. The cruelty that morphed his regular teasing into something more as of late–something bitter and angry and hurt. Ragatha had caught a glimpse of that hurt before, in the first few weeks after Jax’s arrival and in the days after they’d lost Dobby. Whatever had happened, Jax was doing a much worse job of hiding it now.
“I don’t know,” Kaufmo says, echoing her sentiment. “Ragatha, whoever it is…”
Kaufmo glances over her shoulder, gaze focussing on the door next to hers. He bites his lip, eyes weary.
Right. Jax and Ribbit were close. At least they were, before… something happened. Something both of them refused to talk about or acknowledge at all. Something so bad they’d gone from near inseparable to acting like strangers in a single afternoon.
She and Kaufmo had tried to put the pieces together, scarce as they were. There’d been an argument of some kind, but the context eluded them–Ragatha had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with what she’d seen on the haunted mansion adventure, but beyond that…?
They’d assumed they’d work it out eventually. They had all the time in the world here.
And now they had none at all.
Whoever was left behind, whoever had to live with the aftermath of what was now permanently unresolved…
“We need to find them.”
Ragatha reaches for Kaufmo’s forearm and tugs him so hard he stumbles to keep up as she drags him down the hall.
They find Jax.
Ragatha’s heart breaks in two. She sways on her feet, reeling from the shock of seeing a silhouette of purple in the distance and not green. She hadn’t realised until that moment how sure she’d been it was the other way around. That Ribbit–strong, reliable, unshakable Ribbit–would be the survivor of tonight’s tragedy.
Kaufmo tugs her forward by her elbow, voice low and urgent now with Jax in sight. She doesn’t hear the words, but she can hear the grief weighing them down.
Kaufmo calls out to him as they approach, but Jax doesn’t answer.
He’s kneeling in the dirt, staring up at the sky. It’s nothing but empty blackness, devoid of stars or the Moon NPC or any detail at all, as if Caine had forgotten to run the simulation.
Ragatha kneels beside Jax and reaches a hesitant hand to his cheek, turning him to face them. Kaufmo takes a knee at her side.
“H-hey, buddy…”
Jax’s eyes turn towards them. The pain she sees in them in that moment keeps her up at night long after Jax learns how to hide it.
He knows.
Kaufmo’s mouth snaps shut. She feels him shudder beside her.
No one says anything. It feels like an eternity. Ragatha feels his stare boring into her, through her, like he sees all of her and none of her in the same instance. She feels it even when she blinks, when her gaze slides uncomfortably sideways to Kaufmo, hoping for some idea how to proceed from here.
Kaufmo appears equally pinned, helpless, mouth opening briefly before closing again with words he can’t find.
“I didn’t mean it,” Jax’s voice breaks the silence. It’s an awful sound, hoarse and broken from something far beyond crying. She’s heard that rasp from people in the circus before. It was the sound people made when their voice had nothing left to give, when its owner had screamed until they couldn’t anymore.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ragatha says. She has to. They have to hear it–Jax especially.
She’d lost another one. Two in as many months. The way Jax sounds right now, the way he looks? It won’t take half that long before he’s gone, too.
She has to try. Even if it doesn’t feel okay, if she doesn’t believe it herself, she has to try. For them. For him.
For herself.
Three isn’t enough. It isn’t. Four, maybe. But three? When one of those three was so lost in his own mind that he could barely hold a conversation anymore? When one of the three was so socially inept and unlikable even her best attempts at kindness left people with such a foul taste in their mouths that their rejection was a matter of when, not if?
Everything is going to be okay. It will. It has to be. She’ll fix this and make it okay. Somehow.
Jax blinks. His hand raises, movement sluggish as though lifting it took great effort, and pulls her hand from his face.
The grip on her wrist tightens, squeezing with a strength she never imagined him capable of with his thin, boneless arms and squishy padded gloves.
She feels something sharp prick at the fabric of her wrist. Feels the dull burn of threads splitting, of something digging through to the polyester stuffing beneath.
He makes a sound. Ragatha glances up from her wrist, straining to make it out around the ringing in her ears. But it isn’t words. There’s nothing to make sense of. The sound comes again as Jax shoves her hand away. His shoulders tremble with it. It’s breathless, lacking any voice to accompany it. Ragatha mistakes it for a sob.
Crying was a good sign, wasn’t it? Better than the empty shell they’d found at the epicentre of Ribbit’s destructive trail. Crying meant feeling. Feeling–even something as unpleasant as grief, at least meant he still could. Meant he wasn’t too far gone already, numbed by the later stages of abstraction like she’d seen in so many others.
But Jax doesn’t cry. His eyes remain dry.
Instead, he smiles.
His mouth stretches wide, head tilting back to resume his vigil of the empty sky. His hands fall to his knees, bunching in the fabric of his overalls until they shake with the strain. Ragatha’s wrist gives a faint little throb.
He’s laughing.
“No it won’t.”
His words steal the breath from her lungs.
Ragatha turns. Kaufmo is already looking at her, a hand hovering near her shoulder. Whether to ground her or pull her away from the scene, she can’t tell, but there’s something skittish amidst the sympathy in his eyes that wasn’t there before. He doesn’t know what to make of this any more than she does.
“Jax?”
“It won’t,” Jax tilts his head to the side to grin at her, barely able to speak around the laughter forcing its way up his throat. “It–ha! Oh, g-god.”
He wheezes then, chokes, hunching forward with his arms wrapped around his middle, clutching at his sides, chest heaving with breaths too fast to fill his lungs.
Ragatha watches. There’s nothing else she can think to do. She can’t stop this. He wouldn’t hear her now, even if she tried to get through to him. What would she even say? Something so simple, the promise that things won’t be this bad forever, had left him hysterical. Would further attempts add fuel to the fire? End with his hands around her throat this time, squeezing until she couldn’t speak?
He doesn’t believe her.
Ragatha doesn’t blame him.
Ribbit is dead.
For a moment, Ragatha feels a flash of anger. How could Ribbit do this? Why didn’t they say anything? Ask for help? How could they leave her with this? It was selfish. Cruel. They should have reached out. They could have come to Ragatha. She would have…
What would she have done?
What could she do?
Hot tears burn her cheeks.
Ribbit is dead.