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It’s a bit like a craft project that’s never finished. Or a car that sits in the barn on blocks. A novel’s first draft, only ever one chapter deep. A jigsaw puzzle that takes over the dining table, pieces sorted by approximate color, but never matched together.
As Ragatha lays facing the ceiling, she imagines taking one of the jigsaw pieces in her unmoving hand, pointer and thumb pinching together as if they can feel the cardboard and the sharp-cut edges. She wonders what it is, exactly, that makes a perfect day so perfect for this feeling to find her again.
It’s not only on perfect days that she’s haunted like this, mind. It’s many days, at least once every other week, often more. Sad days, ones full of heartache and reminders of old pains and fresh ones rendered by wound or word, these days self-explain the melancholy they bring. Her sadness, then, is tangible, her lethargy an output of predictable input. If anything, she finds them easiest to deal with, obvious enough to meet with deliberate cheer and a defiant smile. Sad days are like corner pieces— they come solved out of the box.
Then there’s the middling days, quiet days, days devoid of input one way or another. These, too, she has solved— edge pieces. Without joys or pains to process, they leave her with only her thoughts and the empty walls of the tent that shine in the light as if plastic. She’s never been sure what material they really are, something like laminated wood or painted concrete, but softer and weaker, yet fully immovable by any force she can muster. The walls are a minefield, basic colors and patterns for her eye to wander along and lay traps for herself as she goes. She’ll pick a corner of the room, an empty frame of vision for her mind to spark against and think, do you remember, before that one abstraction, when you decided that they probably didn’t want you to check on them, so you decided not to? And she’ll shudder at the thought, and look elsewhere, lingering on another stretch of blank red, and remember, she said you’d be lucky to make it to thirty. Middling days leave room for things to catch up. She knows better than to let her eye wander blank walls.
But perfect days, beautiful ones, full of hope and laughter and memories worth keeping, she never was sure why they hurt the most. It’s not every time. If this melancholy was predictable, it would be manageable, it would ruin her less. No, instead, maybe one-in-four times, she’ll have a perfect day, like today. She’ll build up her joy like filling a glass of lemonade right from the pitcher, all the way to the top, not even leaving room for the ice— and then, when she isn’t looking, right in the middle of her thinking something stupid like, days like today make this all worth it, some unseen ghost will swap her glass for poison, and she will drink deeply from it.
She never could figure out why. It seems to her that the only reason for such a thing to happen is because she was happy. Some heartless taxman breathes over her shoulder everywhere she goes, and if she exceeds her allotted and modest ration of joy, it will be confiscated and replaced with melancholy. The rain comes because she treasured the sunshine too deeply. Wounds are drawn on her because she found relief in how the old ones were healing. She is miserable because she dared to be happy— truly happy, not by choice, not by effort, not for pretend, but for real. She felt it. Maybe one day, she’ll learn her lesson.
She sighs, sinking deeper into her unmade bed, strewn uncomfortably over the covers. None of her theories quite add up, not even the cynical ones she only permits to cross her mind in complete solitude. She turns the invisible puzzle piece over in her hands again and again, tracing her finger over the fabric crease in her palm. Every time she’s like this, she comes back to the puzzle, and every time she comes back to the puzzle, she finds more and more spots where pieces do not fit.
She wishes she had her table back.
Instead, her mind trudges along in unhappy indulgence, lingering on bad memories, picking at old wounds that have finally started to scab, painting dark ichor over untainted good memories, and retconning in omniscient narration to explain away every warm smile as a pained grimace that she must have misinterpreted, as she so often does. No one sensation leaps out at her— the specifics bubble deep below in her mind, out of her immediate sight, as she drifts atop the choppy, broiling surface like floating debris. She can’t name any of the toxins that rise up from the depths. She can only name the familiar symptoms as her eyes sting and her chest rises a little less after falling with each exhale.
She wishes she could cry. She wishes she could reach her arm down into the muck and pull out something to hurt about. She’s normally so, so good at crying, at hurting. If there’s a single thing she’s talented in, it’s that— and yet, after a perfect day that ends in this old puzzle, she can never bring herself to feel, only to fester.
A distant laugh— sounds like Gangle, perhaps— echoes from far down the hall as some group she isn’t a part of passes by in the tent. The sound needles at her, but draws nothing, not tears, not blood, not even cotton. She tries to poke deeper.
Pomni doesn’t like softball. I doubt any of them do. So why do you keep dragging them out there? Are you trying to show off? They must be so bored of you, she chides herself internally. Her heart isn’t in it. She feels nothing.
They all have better things to do than humor you. Still nothing. It really was a perfect day. Gangle and Zooble spent most of it in the stands, eating kettlecorn and sketching together. Caine, Pomni, and Bazooble— the opposing team— gave it their all during the game. Kinger and Evil Pomni, drafted into the Sunrays, gave a good effort too. Evil Pomni’s attitude gets on Ragatha’s nerves somewhat, but at least she’s a good outfielder. The sun was out— not The Sun, just a sun, just a golden point of light that renders no comment, only warmth. The air had that fresh summer smell. Evil Ragatha was selling hotdogs with a delectable grumpy frown on her face. It was a good day.
It was wasted on you, she tries next. It stings, a little bit.
Good days are always wasted on you. Because you’re broken, and don’t know how to appreciate them. You aren’t grateful enough. The sting grows in intensity, from needle-thin to more like a twisting knife. You’ve been here for so long, and for what? You made it to this ‘good part’, to the easy days, no more forced adventures, no more torment, no more Jax— she winces at the cruel thought —and you get to be here for it. Instead of him. Instead of Ribbit. Instead of any of them. You belong on that mural, instead of here. Any of the rest of them would do better with this than you.
She laughs at the meager, too familiar pain, so oft repeated in her mind that she’s grown numb. You sound like a broken record, she replies to herself.
Ragatha sighs again, rolling over in bed, facing the wall, arms splayed out in recovery position as she waits for tears— for release— that she knows won’t come. There’s no soothing this, no curing it, only endurance, as always. It will pass, in time. How much time, she does not get to know. Could be half an hour, could be a month. Until it’s done with her, she will simply have to exist within it.
It’s a solution to the puzzle, in a sense— if she wants to see the complete picture, she can always just look at the box and imagine what it must be like to be through with the process.
The word ‘quarantine’ comes to mind. Waiting it out is about the loneliest thing she’s ever known. But if she’s around another, then they’ll see her be miserable, but won’t be able to help, if they even want to.
She’s blessed to have good friends. Thus, her estimate of the specific way being around someone in this state would backfire has changed, in recent times. She doesn’t truly believe that she would be hated or punished for her melancholy anymore. But she does believe, wholeheartedly, that nothing would make her feel more useless than watching their brows knit in concern, their eyes widen in shock at her uncharacteristically broken state, than seeing their best efforts to cheer her up sink into the mire she’s floating in as she shrugs and has to confess with a weary smile, thanks for trying, but sorry, there’s no cure for this.
It’s like a fever. It’s like a rainstorm. It’s like a sunset and the cold night that follows. Just wait, and it will pass. If the present tense of it is unbearable, then cry, because nobody can save you from it. If you can’t cry, then suffer. If you can’t bear to suffer…
Before she can finish the thought, she shakes her head. She can’t imagine a more senseless waste of her privilege to still be here than to let herself abstract now.
Some part of her, though, some small, selfish part of her, wishes she would. She knows those arms from the dark are just a few minutes of a dark sort of meditation away. She’s summoned them before, she can do it again. She just has to close her eyes, start to give up, and then open them again to see her chance to complete the process reaching out to her.
She will not. But she could.
She did not. But maybe she should’ve.
She better not. But she almost wants to.
She wonders if this is what they all felt. If these were their final moments, too. Alone, waiting for the storm to pass like usual, until something changed. Until a quiet moment of acceptance came over them, a small recognition that they didn’t actually care if the sun came back out anymore. A quiet, lonely, unseen moment where they decided that maybe, they’d rather just drown.
She wonders if it hurt. She wonders if it was a relief. She wonders if any of them regret it.
She wonders if she had drowned by now, if she’d regret it. Would there be enough of her left to, buried under the ink and glowing eyes?
Curling up on the bed, Ragatha hugs her knees to her chest. She almost has it, almost has tears in her eye, almost feels something—
But she’s wondered these things too many times before. Nothing comes. It’s the same as it ever was. Nothing can make her feel, when she’s like this. Mother couldn’t beat tears out of her, like this.
She laughs. What a terrible thing to think. What a terrible thing to be. Is she even allowed to pick at the oldest scars in her mind anymore, now that she knows the woman who survived them is out there elsewhere?
She wonders if Susie ever wanted to give up after she walked away from that headset, the way Ragatha remembers her always wanting to.
More voices from the hall. Zooble and Pomni. Laughing, chatting— Ragatha’s happy they’re getting along better these days. They were never enemies, far from it, but they never talked much at first. The voices and the footsteps with them get closer.
Ragatha’s heart aches to rush out to them, to spring up like a trapdoor spider and snare her ladybug from her pleasant afternoon and wrap her up tight and drag her down into this pit, just so she doesn’t have to wait it out alone. There’s nobody she’s more tempted to pull down into this than her love, and nobody who deserves it less.
“I think you should do it, honestly,” Pomni says, voice muffled by the door that seals Ragatha away from her. “I don’t think any of us can sing to save our life, but, like, it’d still be fun.”
“Ragatha’s pretty good, actually. And— uh— Caine, too, apparently…”
Shriveled up in her bed, the doll flinches at her name. There’s a certain way it sounds to her when it’s being spoken by someone who doesn’t know she can hear— or does know, and doesn’t care. Somehow, having heard the compliment that followed doesn’t offer any comfort.
“Mm! Right, I forgot she is. Caine, though, I ah, don’t know if I’m ready for his re-debut quite yet,” Pomni chuckles, a faint note of unease in her laugh.
“Fair. No villain songs allowed at karaoke.”
They share a gallows laugh.
“Alright, I’ll catch you later. I wanna give this to Ragatha before it gets cold.”
“Take ‘er easy.”
Ragatha’s heart pounds in her chest, two parts panic and one part fluster. Her head snaps to the door, waiting for a knock. Her head almost splits in two as it tries to pull her in two different directions— deeper into isolation, and desperately up, forward, into Pomni’s arms.
The knock comes as anticipated. The sound makes her flinch.
“Heya. You in here, Ragsy?”
Her heart pounds faster. She never did tell anyone where she was going, after the softball game. If she stays silent, Pomni will leave. She could be anywhere in the tent, after all. Isolation— quarantine— is still well within her grasp.
It’s the responsible thing to do.
“I got a hazelnut fog for you. I mean, Zooble made it, but— yeah.”
Another knock. Pomni can’t help her. Pomni can’t make the rain stop. Pomni is better off not seeing this side of her.
There’s a heavy sigh from the other side of the door. “Alright. Fine. Where’d her cute cotton ass get off to now… we need a damn PA system.” Pomni mutters, annoyed, footsteps trudging off down the hall.
Despite herself— despite her noble intentions, despite her sense of responsibility, despite her melancholy, a laugh escapes her. Just one little bark, hopping her shoulders as she processes ‘cute cotton ass’. The footsteps and her heart both freeze.
She wants to smack herself. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Hey… Ragatha?”
And there it is. The concern. She can picture her love’s brow knit up tight like a wicker basket, loaded up with gifts and flowers and concern and worry that won’t change anything.
“Are you doing okay?”
“Fucking goddamnit…” she whispers under her breath as an answer, hesitantly standing before marching to the door. She preps a lie— I was napping. I didn’t hear you. I’m doing just great, sweetheart!
As if Pomni would buy that. ‘Napping.’ They don't even need to sleep.
Before she can heed the impulse to put a smile on or fix her posture or concoct some elaborate imagined scenario that would neatly undermine any possible cause for concern, Ragatha opens the door. Her eye is bagged and weary. Her posture is slouched and weak. Her frown is hollow and tired.
Pomni, standing nervously in the doorway holding a tea mug, doesn't even seem to recognize her at first. They've shared a few moments of misery together, even if those had all been with obvious cause. The jester, working with the only precedent she knows, immediately starts searching for said cause, as if her scanning eyes might find it worn on Ragatha’s sleeve.
“What happened?” Pomni asks softly. The fraught worry and dismay in her voice needles at Ragatha's heart.
The doll thinks, finds nothing, and shrugs. It only now dawns on her that Pomni’s dressed in the same sort of outfit she had on back at the bar adventure— half-unbuttoned shirt with rolled sleeves, loose tie, and pinstripe pants.
“Ragatha. Are you okay? What's wrong?”
“...All that ever was,” she answers. There's a small spark of pride as she says it, a quiet humming resonance with the vague melancholy of her answer and the precise way it mirrors the vague melancholy of her heart.
Pomni frowns, eyes almost misty. It's unbearable. “Is there something I can do?”
“I don't know.”
“...Okay. Um. I brought you some tea,” she reminds. “Can I come in?”
Ragatha hesitates, then nods. “Sure. If you have nothing better to do.”
Pomni follows her in, kicking her shoes off and placing her tie on the dresser before she sits down next to Ragatha on the bed. The jester hands over the tea like a peace offering— Ragatha takes it with a mouthed thank-you, cradling it in both hands, feeling the warmth seep through the ceramic and into her mitts. She lifts the cup up to read the words on the side; “#1 MUG”
She smiles weakly at that, though can’t find a laugh in her. She sits slouched, looking down into the frothy surface.
Long seconds of silence pass. Pomni’s eyes scan her up and down, brow arched in concern. Her gaze feels to Ragatha like a spider crawling up her neck as she tenses.
“You… look very handsome,” the doll says with the gesture of a smile, suggesting emotion but devoid of it.
“Ah, thanks. Uh… Zooble finally got some walls for the bar. And a ceiling. Turned it into its own little space. Caine set it up so— there’s this panel on the wall, um, and, it can switch between different lighting styles and even swap our outfits. Zooble had it set to black and white, like that one time during the ‘lightning round’. It’s a cool vibe,” Pomni explains, legitimate excitement swimming beneath the frozen surface of the moment.
The afternoon they must’ve been having there without her offers itself as a needle she can sting herself with; she can barely bother to think about it. “And you figured you’d keep the outfit, I see?”
The jester gives a bashful smile, sharing space on her face with the still-present worry. “Yep. Figured if I came here in it, you’d say something like ‘you look very handsome’.”
“Ha… you, um, know me well.”
“...Zooble and I were talking about having a karaoke night. Didn’t decide when, though.”
“Mm.” Ragatha takes a sip of the tea. Hazelnut-vanilla, her favorite. The comfort it offers drips into the ocean she floats on and dilutes into nothing as she drinks.
Pomni puts a hand on her thigh, giving a gentle squeeze. “You don’t gotta if you don’t want to, but… is there something you need to talk about?”
Letting the question simmer for a moment, Ragatha waits to see if something floats to the surface, waits to see if any particular drop from either the flood below or the storm falling from above needs to be taken and shown off and picked apart. Nothing stands out. “No,” she answers flatly.
“...Okay. If you feel up to it later, just know that I’m here for you.”
“It’s not that…” she sighs. “I just… don’t know what to say. Nothing happened. I had a great morning with you. It was fun playing softball again. Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s— it’s just— it’s nothing. There’s nothing to say. It’s just the usual. Please, don’t worry about me.”
“It doesn’t seem ‘usual’ to me. I almost never see you like this…”
“That’s because I never let you. It happens a lot,” Ragatha admits, digging deeper, regretting every shovelful as she starts to tunnel into the watertable. She takes another sip of tea. “I usually just keep to myself and wait it out. Or put a smile on and push through.”
“You know you don’t have to do that for me, right?”
“I guess I must, since I didn’t bother this time. I’m sorry.”
“I just said— don’t apologize. I don’t want you to have to put on a face for me. You don’t owe me that.”
She feels like she does, but she doesn’t have the energy to argue that particular uphill battle right now. “Maybe. Who knows. But… now you’re… you’re worried. And you’re trying to help. And that’s very, very sweet of you, Pomni, I appreciate the thought. I’m grateful you’re here, but I’m also… not.”
“I can leave…?”
“No— I don’t— I didn’t mean… that… I just… you’re wasting your time, I guess? No, that sounds terrible. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to put it right now.”
Pomni scoots closer, wrapping an arm around her waist and leaning in close. Ragatha leans back against her, treasuring the closeness with what wherewithal she has left. “You’re not a waste of time, Ragatha. If there’s any way I can help you feel better, then I’m going to do that, end of story.”
Ragatha counts the stitches in her dress.
“Hey,” Pomni whispers, giving the doll a gentle squeeze. “I love you.”
Her mitts clench tight for a moment, grasping at the throat of the futility that her ladybug cannot see, no matter how plainly visible it is. “I love you too,” she answers instead, with as much sunshine as she has left, a single ray cutting through dark rolling cloudcover. She can’t quite manage to do it with eye contact. “But— you can’t help. Or, if you can, I don’t know how. There’s no ‘feeling better’, I just have to wait it out. That’s how it always goes.”
Pomni shrugs. “I mean… I guess that’s what my panic attacks are like, so, I understand. Hell, I even get depressed sometimes, too. Everyone does. It’s pretty normal.”
Depressed. It’s a word that belongs in a clinic, Ragatha thinks. It’s too clean. Just a symptom, just an idea, just about as reflective of the lifetime of sorrows that’ve built up to get her in this state as white-painted concrete. She’s not ‘depressed’. She’s alive, too alive for too long, drenched in the burdens inherent.
Or, maybe she’s just being dramatic. She always had a flair for it, though only ever on a private stage.
“...But,” the jester continues, “I guess, there’s no ending something like that early. But it still helps to not have to do it alone.”
“Doesn’t change if I’m alone or not. Seems better to not get anyone else involved if I’m going to be so lowly and miserable either way. I don’t like… being seen this way. I don’t even know why I opened the door. Any other time, I’d have just put a smile on, or… anything. I shouldn’t have let you see it, now you’re worried—”
“I’m not worried,” Pomni argues. “I’m… attentive. Let’s go with that. I’m paying attention to you. Because you’re worth it, and… you kinda seem to need it right now.”
Attentive. ‘Worried’, with the connotations sanded off. Still paying undue effort into a pit. Still ignoring that nothing can hurry this along. Pomni’s just going to be stuck here with her for time interminable, until she either finally gets over herself or the jester just gets bored and leaves. She tries to find some other way to argue against her love’s presence, despite how desperately she wants her to stay, but can’t summon the energy to push back.
Her breath leaks out of her like blood from a wound. “You win,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”
Pomni makes a soft sort of noise. “Don’t be sorry. I mean, hey, what if it was me? Would you just let me rot?”
“No, of course not…”
“Exactly. Never in a million years. You’d stick by me.”
“...It might be all day with this,” Ragatha warns. “I’m really glad you’re here but I don’t know if you can make me feel better.”
“That’s fine. I’m not trying to like, fix you. Be how you are. I’m here, love.”
“I don’t want to take up your time for nothing. Didn’t you have other things to do today?”
Pomni shrugs. “What, am I going back to work tomorrow? It can wait. We got all the time in the world.”
“I just…” Ragatha sighs, leaning into her ladybug. “I feel selfish.”
Nuzzling into her side, Pomni thinks for a moment before answering, “So be selfish, then.”
“Huh?”
“I can’t even count how many times you’ve let me just take what I need. Any time I’ve craved your comfort, you’ve let me have it. So, now’s your turn. Just have me here. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. If being here with you makes this feel any easier, then keep me.”
Ragatha hums uneasily, frown pulled tight. “Are you… sure?”
“Mm. Okay, Let’s…” Pomni sighs. “Let me put it like this: I want to cuddle and support you and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it,” Pomni concludes, stripping her argument down to its barest essentials. “So I’ll be selfish and just do it. I won’t even leave if you tell me to. I’m evil and greedy and I want my Ragatha time. So you’re stuck with me. Now drink your tea, to please me. I demand it,” she haughtily appends, like a tyrannical queen.
Ragatha’s mind blanks as she searches for some reason she must refuse Pomni’s offer— somehow, though it’s the thinnest of disguises, the jester’s presence being wrapped as some kind of favor to her slips the kindness past security. With a soft chuckle despite herself, Ragatha takes a sip as commanded. “There. Happy?”
“Very,” Pomni smiles back.
“...Thanks, ladybug.”
Ragatha’s never done well with silences. Often, she regards them as uncomfortable blanks, better off filled by something nice or positive, lest something much like what she’s feeling now take the open space as an invitation. Silences leave time for everyone in the room— herself especially— to piece together all she had and is doing wrong.
With Pomni, these days, it feels different. Different enough, at least. She lingers in the still peace of the moment without reservation, her love’s arm around her waist and head against her shoulder as Ragatha cradles her tea and empties it sip by eventual sip, as if it were an hourglass full of trickling sand.
The last sip is lukewarm. She sets the cup down on her nightstand, peeling away from the jester’s half-embrace only for a moment before returning to it. Her hands remain floating on her lap, scritching at the folds of her dress as Pomni holds her close.
“...Thanks for the tea, sweetheart,” she says, because she feels she’s supposed to.
“You’re welcome, darling.”
Ragatha smiles gently at the floor. Another brief beat of silence passes before she interrupts it with a soft huff. “Still haven’t settled on a petname, huh?”
Pomni sighs. “Nope. I’ll find one eventually.”
“I don’t know, I kinda like the variety. I never know what’ll you say next, but it’s always sweet.”
Pomni chuckles. “Well, let’s pretend it’s intentional, then.”
“Sure.”
The silence returns, tranquil and unyielding to anything but deliberate interruption. Ragatha wonders how long it’s been already. Her eye wanders to Pomni’s hand wrapped around her waist, then back down to her own, restless in her lap. “...Can I hold you?” she asks. Sometimes, she just goes for it and hopes for the best. Sometimes, Pomni gently brushes her hands away without a hint of frustration, and she keeps to herself the way it tears her heart in two every time. She doesn’t have the energy for that, this time. She has to ask.
Pomni scoffs. “Of course. You don’t have to ask, you know. If I’m ever not in the mood, you let me worry about that, okay? I’ll tell you.”
It isn’t that easy. “...Okay,” she answers anyway. She doesn’t move right away, almost forgetting her request. After a moment, she puts an arm over Pomni’s shoulder, leaning into the jester as her fingers idly play with her loose shirtcollar. “Thank you.”
The silence lingers for one, two— interrupted. Pomni hums, a small noise of concern that Ragatha reads as a note of failure, like a missed piano key, like a crack in her voice of the kind she always has in her nightmares, when she dares to scream back at the ghost looming over her, knife in hand. She quietly hates herself for regarding a noise her ladybug made as anything so ugly.
“...You, uh, sure that’s all you want?” Pomni asks. “You feel kinda stiff.”
Ragatha’s sure it isn’t. She wants a lot more closeness than she feels like she can take, right now. No permit for selfishness can push her through. She tenses further, saying nothing. Maybe, she hopes, the silence will drown the question out, like evening rain washing chalk off the sidewalk.
Another noise, gruffer, almost annoyed— it makes Ragatha flinch. Pomni takes her by the shoulders and guides her gently down to the bed. “Let’s cuddle. Stop me if you don’t want to, else, just… yeah,” she mutters, scooting back on the bed as she gets into place, each of them on their side, facing eachother. Ragatha curls in close, forehead to Pomni’s chest, hands folded up in what little space remains between them as if in prayer. One of the jester’s arms goes over her side and the other snakes under, as Pomni holds her close, rubbing circles into her back.
“...Thank you,” the doll says again. Broken record. She skips along some more: “Thank you… th… thank you…”
Silence, again, a pause to think. Then: “You deserve it.”
Ragatha doesn’t voice her disagreement. She isn’t in an arguing mood, and Pomni wields pathos most potently, even if her logic isn’t as compelling.
The doll sinks into the embrace, still and silent. She listens to the shuffle of small movements against the ruffled covers, rustling like oak branches in a gentle breeze. She soaks in the scent of her love, that familiar sort of rubber tinge that always reminds her of a neatly-packed pencil case on the very first day of new school year. It’s blended with a faint note of apple cider, currently. She treasures the warmth, the closeness, the presence. It can’t heal her, but like a kitchen appliance, her heart hums away without issue, so long as she remains plugged into her arms.
It’ll stop, the moment they’re apart. She’s rooted in place until the storm passes, but at least she has shelter.
Minutes pass, or maybe hours— Ragatha isn’t counting, and Pomni neither comments on nor reacts to the passing time, whatever its increment.
Eventually, without fanfare or announcement, Pomni’s hand wanders up to the back of her head. Her fingers run slowly up through Ragatha’s wooly hair, thumb brushing about where her ear would go, if she had one. The sensation fires warm tingles up and down her theoretical spine as she hums— Pomni takes her reaction as encouragement, and doesn’t stop except to occasionally lose herself playing with the tassel-like ends of Ragatha’s hair.
Each brush curls Ragatha’s head deeper into Pomni’s chest and ups the weight keeping her eyelid closed. Her consciousness, as if being massaged the same as her cloth scalp, starts to settle and soothe, floating towards sleep.
Right before she drifts off, however, Ragatha reawakens to a familiar flash. A scent she can’t place crosses her memory, along with a place she doesn’t remember, a moment she can’t recount, a single flash of experience just like this one, held once long ago. She’d call it nostalgia, if only because she can’t think of a better name. The puzzle of the feeling puts her mind back to work, as she wonders what Pomni’s tender touch reminds her of.
She’s been soothed before, usually after breaking down crying, mostly in the circus and not so much before it. It’s a rare occurrence, but she’s not a stranger to a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, a pitying hug, or a ‘there there’. However, none of that holds a candle to the present, so she keeps looking. Tuning in on the vague memory, she’s baffled as she finds it’s an old one, recorded sometime when she was little, frail, and a lot better at crying than she is these days. Back when she hadn’t used up all her tears quite yet.
Perhaps, somehow, it’s a memory of Mother. Her cold cruelty was only mostly consistent. Sometimes, bafflingly, she had alleged comfort to offer, but it was conditional, and it was frightening. Ragatha knew from experience how quickly it could turn to anger if it didn’t work the way she expected it to. Mother never allowed her to be selfish with the rare soothing she provided. If it was wasted effort, she knew better than to reveal such.
Tears were always the key to pity— or kindness, as she always wanted to pretend it was. If she was crying, the calloused hand dangling drunkenly off the side of the recliner in the living room might open up for her to cling onto. If she was crying, Mother might sigh and storm away, instead of wasting her breath screaming. If she was crying, that cruel yellow smile would narrow and turn away from her in what she had always sort of hoped was shame. If she was crying, people acted like they cared.
It couldn’t be a choice, of course, it had to be real, or else they would be right about her— she’d be pathetic, manipulative, attention-seeking, lying to them. If she cried, it had to be because she hurt, and the only way she could prove it was if it was torn out of her. She couldn’t let herself cry, it had to happen to her. She had as little say in the reaction as she did in what caused it.
So she wonders, then, what possible line of connection there is to draw between now and any prior pity she’s known, when she isn’t crying yet. When she is, by all measures, not quite broken, when there’s nothing to fix, when there’s no obligation or optics to fulfill, no sudden sense of ‘oh, I suppose it’d only be right to start giving a fuck’. She knows Pomni isn’t like that, she knows her ladybug genuinely cares, without pity, without remorse, and with more than a sense of common empathy as motive.
But she’s about the first. Either they didn’t care, or they weren’t there. Pomni’s the first to do both. Who else could possibly have ever made her feel this way?
What, she realizes, not who.
It strikes her like lightning. She remembers lying in the exact pose she’s in now, though colder, trying to find a warmth that summed to less than half of what Pomni offers from the thick comforter overtop her. She remembers being small, so small that the little ragdoll in her arms was almost her size. She remembers the grandfather clock down the hall, counting the seconds of misery for her, so she could never lose track of the time. She remembers running her hands through Ann’s hair, not because the doll needed it, but because if she closed her eyes tight enough, pretended hard enough, she could just about imagine taking the doll’s place, being held close, being comforted, whether or not she cried. She could model and act out what she desperately wished for.
And now it’s come true. She’s the doll now, even literally. Hands run through her hair, even though her arms don’t hold Pomni back. Warmth flows into her, though she offers none in return. Kindness wraps around her, and she didn’t even need to cry to earn it.
She didn’t even need to ask for it.
It had become a ritual for her, once upon a time, until she’d burned out its imaginative comfort to ashes and given up on the fantasy, until Ann was too small to ever work as a vessel for her vicarious, fading hope to one day be held like this.
But it came true.
She smiles wide, almost laughing— there it is! There’s a way out, a spark of levity, a burst of hope to cheer the moment up. There’s a silver lining, drawn around one of life’s perfect punchlines. Her heart buzzes with excitement and her hands tremble as she gathers her breath to share her discovery with Pomni, as she prepares to laugh about how funny it all is.
Her mouth opens to let out a laugh. The sound of it is strangled, weary, mournful, wounded.
She tries again— same result. Pomni nuzzles her cheek against the top of Ragatha’s head.
And again— no change.
“It’s okay, darling. It’s okay,” Pomni soothes.
Ragatha's heart twists and her hands shake as she realizes with dull surprise that it was never funny. Her arms wrap tight around her ladybug as she buries her tear-damp face in the jester’s chest.
Her earlier wish came true, too— she’s crying. She’s feeling something. She’s feeling everything. It comes as waves, wracking her back and chest with heaving gasps and broken shudders, spilling out of her clenched-shut eye, rattling her quivering lip like windows in loose frames shuddering against the gale.
The storm pours down on her in full force. Pomni weathers it with her, as if it was just a passing rain. Ragatha shelters in her, trusting in the calm in her voice, in the love in her touch, and in the kindness she’s never met before but always prayed might find her.
“You’re okay. I got you. I love you,” Pomni promises, and Ragatha believes her.
Though she tries to say it back through the sobs, she can’t manage it; her voice is too choked, too strained, too tired.
Neither kindness nor catharsis cure the moment or change the weather. Nothing can. In a sense, Ragatha dreads the future all the worse now; save for a power outage or her own surrender, there is no defined end to her being. Her head spins trying to envision the uncountable number of days just like this one in her future, and her heart twists to imagine how many of them Pomni won’t be there for. It’s only taken a single taste, a single instance of mercy for her to become addicted to the relief, she can tell already as she clings tight and pours herself empty into Pomni’s chest, each gasp and cry answered with another gentle heartbeat, a repeated promise of, I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.
The next time she isn’t, it will be all the harder. She hopes that when the time to face it alone comes, she can carry this memory in with her, that her wandering mind will seek this moment out rather than its usual go-to's. Though, there’s no guaranteeing that, just as there’s no ending the rain early. She can only wait for it to pass, and marvel at how effortlessly Pomni endures its patter.
It’s easier than waiting alone, even if just this once. When the rain stops, when her voice returns to her, and when she can speak again, Ragatha promises herself that she will say thank you, and I love you.
If she could speak now, though, she’d be selfish. The words she’d say now repeat in her head on loop: Please don’t let go.