Chapter Text
“Good evening. Actually, no. Bad evening. Awful evening”.
Ragatha nodded to herself and marched further with all the confidence of a person who has no idea what they are doing.
The glittering from the far corner answered her with the profound dignity of a moody teenager, meaning it did not answer at all. Typical. How very typical. Ragatha huffed to herself softly, then brightened as if she had just remembered she was the protagonist of this weird little scene.
“Oh well”, she said, aiming for a wounded aristocrat, and probably landing closer to a triumphant schoolgirl. “Congratulations. All of my friends are out there. Being. You know. Friends. That’s what not being a cruel and aaaaaawwwwful jerk gets you”.
She sat down abruptly with a delicate rustle of skirts. She raised an accusatory finger.
“Before we begin, let it be known that you have brought this talk on yourself too. And oh, I am going to talk! And you are going to listen, and there shall be no escape at all”, she giggled to herself, and then looked at the abstraction with a scandalized sort of fascination. “Look at you. Real impressive. Love the tragic beast vibe. Very brooding. Much tragedy. “I have never been understood by anyone in the world””, she theatrically intoned. “Did you know that the Beast from the Disney cartoon was actually called Adam? And we already had Caine and Abel. God, too. And now we only need an Eve, don’t we? Stop trying to make Pomni into your Eve. It won’t work! I won’t let her!”
Ragatha nodded firmly, and suddenly went quiet. Blinking owlishly, she realized that she had somehow slid to the floor without realizing.
“Oh.”
She smoothed down her skirts with the air of a duchess attempting to recover from a carriage accident. She failed at that too. Guess that was her fate now. A fallen heroine in a very cheap soap opera that her mother would catch her watching when she was a little girl.
“Where was I? I think I hate you?... I practiced this in the hallway, you know. Three times. The hallway clapped. You should have heard me there! Will you even hear me if I leave and talk to you from the hallway? But it’s so comfy here… I understand why you never want to leave”, she mused to herself.
“You know that no one liked you, right? I asked. Even Pomni said she didn’t. I think that was the point. Why would you make a point out of everyone hating you? Isn’t the entire purpose to make people like you? Why be near people at all if you aren’t trying to make them like you?”.
Ragatha was melting into the floor. Her tongue was going faster than she could keep up with it. She was listening to herself with an almost scientific, detached curiosity. Is that what she had to say? She didn’t even know that. She hoped the other one was paying attention to everything spilling out of her mouth just as carefully.
“I won. And you have lost. Are you happy now, sitting here all alone, not pissing everyone off, not being the most annoying jerk in the entire Circus?”
Cartoonishly clinking blinks from the dark were her only answer. She made sure to wait for a while just in case the abstraction had anything else to add, or a limb to throw at her body.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited just a little bit more, in case some triumphant closing point might still arrive from the layers of the void. It did not.
“Huh. Rude”.
She frowned.
“You used to talk so much”, her voice slipped on a whiny note for a second. “Back then. Back when…”
Ragatha stalled, suddenly confronted with the arithmetic of time in the Circus, which seemed to go nowhere useful, and somehow still upset her. It did not distract her from the disappointingly lukewarm audience for long.
“Come oooonnnnnn. Say something! Do you even have a mouth? Can you scream? Shout? Cry? You always had something to say, even when you were refusing to say anything at all!”
This wasn’t helping at all. She reached for a bottle of the stupid sauce she brought with herself, hoping to see some of it at the very bottom, even a drop.
That was when the abstraction finally decided to stop pretending a polite neon lamp and slammed its tail into the bottle, taking Ragatha’s hand with it. The sheer audacity of it was enough to get Ragatha back on her feet. She marched towards the abstraction to give it a stern disappointed elementary school teacher talk, raising her remaining hand either to point in its….. face? Maw? Clusters of judgmental neon eyes?.. - or to punch it, either option felt educational. Her chest was swelling with a delighted, vindicated satisfaction, the “I knew it!” pulsing warmly inside of her.
“So we are doing physical violence now. Lovely. Very direct communication style. You are a piece of work even from the other side of the grave, aren’t you? Didn’t take you long to drop the sweet, tragic little pet front, huh? And what for, over some stupid stupid sauce? Are you jealous or what? Do you want some? Arghhh, I hate you, you should know that!”
Her fist pounded with the unstoppable, furious force of a newborn into the eye-covered black void. She did not have much field experience in beating up abstractions, but Kaufmo gave her plenty experience of being beaten up by them.
The impact crackled. The air stuttered.
The hit… Had left her hand with the same glitching scars as all contact with abstractions did. Ragatha got stuck staring at her remaining, now painfully glitching hand. And not even a dent left in the jerk, for all her trouble! Of course he would be left perfectly intact.
Of course.
This was all so terribly unfair.
She flopped down to the floor, in front of the abstraction. She didn’t notice she started crying.
“Why are you there, darn you? It doesn’t matter if you’re here or not here, you cause problems all the same! You can be loud and unbearable, or you can be a silent blob, and somehow it’s still all about you! Pomni is my best friend, she said I’m her best friend, and she spends more time babysitting your corpse than willing to hang around me! Do I have to also abstract for them to start caring? For them to notice me at all?”
The abstraction kicked the stupid sauce bottle straight into her face.
Ragatha blinked.
Pink foam splattered across her button eye.
“Ah. Thanks, I needed that”.
She sat in the quiet, tears and sauce dripping down from her face. She felt stupid, but it wasn’t as shameful and horrible as it was a few moments ago. The glittering void started to look almost comforting, the shape, the dark colors, even the eyes. So many eyes. Statistically, it was reassuring, honestly. The more eyes there were, the lower the chance of losing one. Basic mathematics.
Ragatha took a deep breath. Looked around.
It stopped feeling hostile and oppressive.
It felt almost like… A room where you could sit in without feeling the need to perform happiness correctly.
“Does abstracting hurt?” she asked finally. “What is it like? Is it like when Caine tortured us?”
“It’s dark and quiet. Pretty peaceful. Nice place to sit with your thoughts and figure them out, when you haven’t had the chance to do that before”.
For several eternity-long moments Ragatha thought that the abstraction had actually talked back. It took her an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that the voice came from behind her.
“Hi, Ragatha”.
Pomni waved.
Ragatha screamed.
Neither the abstraction nor Pomni seemed to be much disturbed by her screaming.
Pomni, who had been sitting cross-legged near the tent’s entrance, was quickly approaching her. She looked soft and sleepy, delicately tired in that way she always seemed to be lately. Ragatha wanted to give her a hug and ask her to please get better. But she knew that the reason for Pomni’s state was sitting here with them.
She couldn’t fix this.
Instead of making those longing eyes that Pomni always seemed to make at the abstraction whenever she went into the tent, she didn’t acknowledge the abstraction at all. Her firm, earnest gaze was locked on Ragatha.
“Do you want to see something you haven’t seen before?”
“What?”
Pomni took a slow, deliberate breath. Exhaled slowly.
Her determined, calmly assured posture made her look like she was about to open a door that should not exist in this room.
“I want to show you Jax… when he is honest”.