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Sometimes, Ragatha wonders if she should really just give up after all.
The few past adventures have been downright awful. She can’t count how many times she’s ripped her dress, popped off her button, torn off her hands, blown her head off—literally. It’s normal, she’s a ragdoll, but for the love of God, could she use a break.
With Jax around, though? Forget taking a break, she can’t even exist. In peace. In silence. Can’t even co-exist with him without getting run through the wringer, or whatever the nearest contraption that can mangle her to shreds is.
God forbid she tries to be nice to him. And she tries, every single damn day she tries, and somehow it still isn’t enough.
She’ll probably never be enough, but she’s accepted that.
(Seeing Jax and Pomni together stings, but it's nothing averting her eyes and swallowing down her feelings can’t fix.)
A dull pulse blooms at the back of her head. It’s safe to say she’s supposed to be experiencing a migraine, though the pain is mitigated thanks to her digital body. That’s one circus perk she can appreciate: the ability to still feel pain. It preserves a semblance of her humanity, no matter how faint.
But honestly, it’s hard to feel any gratitude when they’re never truly given breaks. Sure, they have time to sleep before the next adventure, but does anyone really sleep? Who’s to say that they aren’t just disassociating for a couple of hours before Caine rallies them out of bed? That their consciences never fully turn off because they’re stuck in a digital realm in digital avatars void of fatigue, of thirst, of hunger, of death—
Are they even real?
A huge bang jolts Ragatha out of her spiral. Focus, she tells herself, slapping two mittens against her cheeks. There’s no time for distractions with a serial killer on the loose, and though this is one of Caine’s tamer ideas, she would rather preferably escape intact. At the very least, this adventure doesn’t involve any intricate puzzles or contraptions meant to stimulate their brains, as Caine had once put it. The hardest task is navigating through maze-like rooms and hiding from danger when necessary. Just another run-of-the-mill survival game, nothing too extravagant.
She’d been crouched down in a corner of a room, straining to hear the littlest creak in case she needed to flee. But she’d gotten too distracted by her own thoughts, gripping her dress tighter and clamping a hand over her mouth, holding her breath as another creak breaks through her false sense of safety. Another, and another, then—
Crash! The ceiling above gives out and something long, lanky, and most definitely a person falls through. Ragatha squeezes herself into a tiny ball, shaking as she watches the figure emerge from underneath the broken floorboards and rubble, grunting as dust billows up into the air surrounding them.
Once they gain their bearings, they notice Ragatha’s curled up form. “Oh, it’s only you, Rags.”
The nickname tells Ragatha all she needs to know about the newcomer—Jax, who plucks a splinter from his head and flicks it in Ragatha’s direction. “Jeez, I barely escaped that psycho,” he sighs, glancing up at the ceiling with a dry chuckle. “Things would’ve gotten preetty ugly if I hadn’t fallen through.”
Ragatha bats the stray splinter away and gives him a look. Clearly, not the person she’d want to be with in this horror movie-type scenario.
“What’s with the face?” Jax asks, marked by a wide, condescending grin. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“You idiot!” she whisper-yells at him. “I can’t believe you just—” Groaning into her hands, she throws them up and stomps towards the door. “Wave a huge sign that says ‘We’re right here!’ while you’re at it, Jax!”
Unbothered, he follows behind her with a shrug. “Well, with the way you’re leaking stuffing all over the place, they’re sure gonna find you first.”
She immediately sweeps her gaze over the ground, and unfortunately, Jax is right. On the floor where she had been crouched is her own white stuffing, tiny clumps of cotton that are noticeable enough to become a trail. As if on cue, the pain at the back of her head grows, and she brings a trembling hand to the source: a tear running across the back of her head. Her hair must’ve gotten caught on something while she was crawling between spaces, and had failed to notice in her haste. Of course Jax had to point it out. She’s feeling worse than embarrassed. Humiliated. In her shame, she grumbles, “At least I’m not the one who fell through an entire floor.”
Jax looks annoyed for a split second before he jumps—really jumps at the second crash and bang that falls through the hole and lands on the broken pile of wood in the middle of the room, a chainsaw revving through a new cloud of dust.
“Oh God,” Ragatha says, and when she blinks she’s already pulling Jax with her out of the room and down the hall and around so many corners, the last thing on her mind is getting closer to the exit.
“Rags!” Jax’s voice cuts through her panic. His gloved hand tugs on her wrist, and she finds herself being pulled in the other direction. “C’mon, you’ll just lead us in circles. Did you even look at the map?”
“There was a map?”
“Yeah.” Even as they’re booking it, he regards her smugly. “For those who didn’t spend all their time hiding like a coward.”
Then she’s being tugged into a dark, enclosed space, the door closing softly shut behind them. Most likely a broom closet with all kinds of little living creatures. Creepy, crawling, and…
“Centipede,” Jax whispers.
Ragatha screams, but a hand promptly slaps over her mouth. She’s given a ‘tsk’ and a hardly visible eyeroll. Only Jax’s eyes are bright enough to light up the space, although barely.
Jax shushes her, and she relents, knowing that getting angry here wouldn’t do either of them any favors. His hand lifts for a brief second, but she takes the chance anyway.
“What is wrong with y—mmpfh?!”
“Shut it, Rags.”
The hand is back to smothering her. She grabs his scrawny wrist and rips it away, her entire body heaving from a lack of air, an adrenaline high, and a waning emotional regulatory system.
No one else to thank for that than Jax.
She stares at him with a frenzied look, and he doesn’t blink. Doesn’t move an inch even as Ragatha still has his wrist locked in her hand. She frowns in concern, but Jax doesn’t react. Just… stares.
His pupils are blown wide and fixated on her. His mouth has disappeared and the normally grinning Jax has been replaced by this weird, silent creature who is suddenly leaning forward into Ragatha’s space. Startled, she drops his hand and scrambles back, pressing herself as far back against the wall as physically possible.
“Jax!” She hisses, then starts sweating when she realizes that talking isn’t helping and that he isn’t going to stop anytime soon. “Jax, what the %$#@ are you doing?!”
He’s at least two centimeters from her face. She can feel his soft breathing and his silent intensity so close her face involuntarily reddens. He isn’t saying anything and he won’t respond to her either. But here, in this closed space, she’s ninety-nine percent sure he’s crossing a line she didn’t think he’d ever cross, so she wrenches her eye shut and prays, hopes, that he had just hit his head too hard and sneaks a hand between her face and his, and pushes with all her strength.
…No dice.
Ragatha cracks open her eye to find him sitting there, face planted against her palm, still as a rock. Tentatively, she moves her hand back, and he lunges forward, butting his head against her palm.
The action leaves Ragatha so dumbfounded she doesn’t have it in her to move right away. After a moment, she tries pulling back again, but Jax is so adamant to keep his head connected to her mitten that she resigns to just leave it there.
Silence for ten agonizing seconds, then weakly: “Are you okay?”
She’s paralyzed, caught between not wanting to pull back and wanting to put some needed distance between them. Conflicted, she absentmindedly caresses the space between Jax’s ears with the tips of her mitten. She doesn’t realize what she had been doing until the bunny rubs back against her palm in little circular motions, almost like he… he—
Almost like he’s nuzzling her?
Ragatha’s brain nearly fries itself with the realization that Jax has somehow reverted back to his base instincts of a rabbit, most likely due to a glitch in Caine’s system that’ll disappear soon, though a small part of her wants to keep smoothing his ears down, keeping him quiet and obedient for a time. For once ever since he arrived at the circus.
Embarrassing as this is, it isn’t entirely unpleasant. It’s peaceful, and she’s been craving this kind of reprieve for so, so long. No Jax harassing her, no imminent danger for the time being, just complete darkness and silence with a bunny who likes her attention (although that bunny is Jax, but if she doesn’t think about it too hard, it’s better for her mental health).
Her thoughts are interrupted by a rough, rhythmic noise. It’s Jax making those noises by grinding his teeth together, and the longer she listens to it, it almost sounds like a purr.
Jax purring.
Like something domesticated, a housecat vying for attention. Ragatha feels a wicked smile stretch the line of her mouth, but she hardly feels sorry. He’d never forgive her for this. Hell, he’d tear every stitch from her body if he found out what transpired in this closet.
Yet, her eyes soften at the calm, contented-looking Jax in front of her. Maybe she’d like him more if he acted like this more often—
A shrill revving sounds terrifyingly close to their hiding spot, and instinctively Ragatha shoves Jax back so hard he hits the other wall, the impact causing objects to fall from the shelves and rain down noisily, drawing more attention to their cover. Jax’s eyes go swirly, and he seems to snap out of whatever reverie had fallen over him.
“God, Rags, what was that for?” His eyes stabilize to their normal shape as he rubs his forehead, flinching when a particularly heavy object grazes his shoulder. It clatters to the floor and unsheathes, revealing a long, silvery blade.
A sword in a broom closet. Sounds like something Caine would implement so that they aren’t completely powerless. Jax stares at it a bit dazedly, tracing its shiny surface with a finger. But he doesn’t get much time to admire it as the chainsaw bursts through the wooden door, causing Ragatha to shriek and Jax to groan like he’s been inconvenienced.
“Wow, great job luring the psycho to us!” Jax yells over the chainsaw’s screech, but Ragatha doesn’t have time to retort when the saw retracts and penetrates the wall right beside her head, triggering her knee-jerk reaction to launch herself onto Jax, who makes a disgruntled noise and pushes her off the second they make contact.
He glares at Ragatha, telepathically signaling to her that it's all her fault. She manages to sit beside him rather than on top of him, and through panting breaths she meets his scathing sarcasm with the last dregs of her rationality. “We wouldn’t have made any noise if you hadn’t been—“ She gulps, feeling almost guilty, “—weird.”
“Weird?” Jax scoffs. “Oh please, all I did was sit here while you started freaking out, and you’re calling me the weird one?”
“You—!” She feels heat rise to her head and she huffs a short breath to calm herself. It’s only Jax. Not worth your time. Except it’s especially difficult because it’s Jax. “You were— getting all close and—!”
The engine revs loudly as though to remind them of its presence, and Jax stands before she can articulate her argument. She starts to protest, but he cuts her off. “Well,” he says, eyeing the moving blades with disinterest. “It’s either you or me, Rags. What’s it gonna be?”
Ragatha seethes up at him silently. It’s beyond frustrating that he won’t acknowledge his odd behavior from not even two minutes ago, as though he doesn’t hear her. It makes her unreasonably annoyed to think she’s being ignored, but whatever the case is, she needs to think rationally. Maybe he wasn’t aware of his actions. Maybe it's the sort of personality transformation Kinger undergoes in the dark. She hadn’t considered that the others may experience the same phenomenon.
“Too late.”
“H- Huh? Wait, wait, Jax?!?”
Before she can process anything, she’s being flung out the door and barrelling into the murderer, effectively knocking the chainsaw out of their hands.
The machine vibrates along the floor, inching towards Ragatha before it’s too late. While the killer is out cold, she’s barely holding up herself, her head fuzzy and disoriented. The chainsaw catches the hem of her dress and rips through her leg, causing stuffing to explode everywhere. The pain only lasts a minute, and thankfully she manages to pull away before the blades cut her in half.
She watches Jax stab the chainsaw through with the sword until it malfunctions and dies, and then loom over the murderer with a manic grin and proceed to stab them at least twenty times, well past what is ethically reasonable.
Once he’s done, Jax walks over to her and hauls her by the back of the dress towards the exit. “C’mon, Dolly, let’s get outta here.”
She doesn’t have the energy to respond or protest about being dragged across the floor, leaving a trail of stuffing in her wake. They walk through the portal to find the circus empty. Not even Caine or Bubble are around. Usually the others would be here by now, but perhaps they haven’t realized that the coast is clear yet.
They can handle themselves, she figures. She has bigger things to focus on instead—namely, her torn limb and the stuffing-loss that only Caine can repair with the snap of a finger.
Jax isn’t very helpful, whistling and glancing around like he doesn’t know the state she’s in, which he’s mostly responsible for.
She scoffs quietly, turning her head away. It’s not like she expected him to help her anyway. But waiting for Caine can be a tedious affair, and she’d like nothing more than to hobble down to her room and take a breather. It feels like she’s been on her feet incessantly, and it’s messing with her brain a little.
…Like what happened in the broom closet. She still isn’t sure if that was real or not, or if it was just a scarily realistic hallucination meant to torment her and keep her up at night.
Not that that doesn’t happen already, but if it’s Jax terrorizing her mind, then there’s clearly something wrong here.
Earlier, that wasn’t like him at all. Jax, letting her pet him? Normally he’d kill her, and he’s said so himself before. Insinuated many, many times that he hates her, so why would he go ahead and pull that?
It’s almost insulting.
“Whatcha thinking about?” Jax appears in her line of sight like a perfectly timed jumpscare, causing her to flinch. He snickers, propping an arm on her head for leverage as he leans down to her level, tone dropping to something conspiratorially taunting. “Is it me?”
“Of course,” she replies flatly, and Jax’s gleefulness flickers like a lightbulb nearing its end before she continues heatedly, “This is all your fault.”
The tension in his face dissipates, and his grin dials back to normal. “Nope, that was aall you, Rags,” he sing-songs, pressing a hand to his chest as though he were hurting, pouting and shaking his head. “I did no such thing.”
Ragatha fumes silently, not noticing how abnormally close their faces are again until Jax goes quiet (again) and his pupils grow wide (again), and no words are spoken between them as he’s staring her down in that same strange, hypnotized manner that feels intimidating. Like he’s challenging her, but to what, she can’t begin to imagine.
At least now she doesn’t have to sit there and wonder if Jax is glitching or if Caine had messed with his brain and turned it to mush. They aren’t in the accursed broom closet anymore, but the open and vast circus where she can use her good leg to propel her back as far away as possible, which makes her movements jerky and delays her escape by one obnoxious bunny, caught off guard by the sudden distance between them, that he slips on her stuffing and tumbles down on top of her.
Yellow gloves planted on either side of her head and Jax looking more disoriented than she’s ever seen him—eyes swirling round and round before they morph into big, dopey squares fixated on her—Ragatha doesn’t even know what to think. She can’t think, given that the tears on her body have accumulated into one massive, aching pulse of pain all around, and having Jax not say anything—which is ironic, because all she’s ever wanted was for him to shut the hell up—is the cherry on top to her shit-show of a day.
She can’t take it anymore.
“Jax!” She shrieks, chest heaving with ten adventures worth of pent-up rage. “You’re doing it again!”
His head ticks slightly to the side, and he mumbles, “Doing what?”
“That!”
“That?”
“This!”
“This,” he repeats, and Ragatha is slowly starting to believe that there’s something severely wrong with him in the head.
If he’s trying to embarrass her in some perverted, roundabout way, fine. That’s just Jax being an asshole, nothing mind blowing. But if he’s genuinely clueless and isn’t faking it when he claims innocence, then she’s worried about him. When it comes to Jax, it’s hard trying to reconcile these emotions. Her lip trembles with the difficulty of finding the words to get through to him, and ultimately her mind comes up blank. It’s overwhelming having Jax so close, and her working leg is moving before she knows it, kicking him in the gut and forcing a lungful of air out of him.
She sits up in a hurry, glaring at Jax when she’s created a good six feet between them. Jax doesn’t seem to notice, clutching his belly and appearing more annoyed that he was nearly sent flying than the fact that Ragatha keeps spewing wackily censored expletives in his direction.
“Jeez, Rags, you’re so loud,” he complains with a highly exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Don’t you ever know when to shut up?”
“What you need to do is explain whatever it is you’ve been doing,” she demands, jabbing a finger towards him. “And don’t you dare play dumb.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says innocently.
“Yes,” she grits out. She refuses to be gaslit today. “Yes, you do.”
“Nope, no clue.”
“Yes, you d—”
“Has anyone ever told you how strong you are, Ragatha?”
Ragatha blinks at him.
Jax lowers his eyes slyly and grins, raising his eyebrows. “You’re stronger than you look, aren’t you, Raggy?”
Her eye twitches.
“Well, you’re softer than you think.”
Her rare but brutal honesty hits Jax like a bullet, leaving him faltering for a second before his face contorts and he goes on the defensive, voice flat and unamused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her heart drops; she doesn’t know what possessed her to be so… mean. She backtracks, flailing her hands in front of her and stuttering, “I– I didn’t—“ She takes a deep breath, backtracking. “Nothing,” she says, averting her eyes. “Nevermind.”
‘Sorry’ sits ready at the tip of her tongue. She wants to say it so badly, but she can’t. Something holds her back.
The memory of Jax being so receptive to her touch is seared into the threads of her plush hands. She can’t just forget that. She can’t apologize for liking it.
…
Oh.
Oh God.
“H- Hey, Caine?” She speaks up in a panic, ignoring the confused furrow in Jax’s brow, or the obvious distrust in his expression. “A little help here?”
Jax keeps staring at her, but it’s different from all those other times. He’s conscious, he’s here. Little by little, she crumples under the pressure of Jax trying to pick her apart under his scrutiny. He squints at her, she keeps her eyes trained the other way, and her suffering prolongs until Caine appears with a flourish of his little wand and a boisterous greeting.
She swears she sees angel wings floating behind him.
As saviors do, Caine repairs her mangled parts with a snap, and she’s good as new. Just then, the others amble into the circus, looking as weary and spent as she had, and usually she’d lag behind to ask how they were doing, but today she darts away before anyone notices, slipping under Jax and Caine’s radar.
She makes the conscious effort to lock her door, though it’s pointless when Jax has keys to everyone’s room. Still, it offers her some comfort as she sinks into her mattress, staring up at the dark ceiling.
She ends up drifting off into a light slumber. With time being so elusive in the circus, she can only guess that her nap lasted about an hour or so. It had certainly helped her process the events of the last adventure. Her head feels clearer, her thoughts organized. There’s nothing a nap can’t fix.
It’s one of the very small ways to decompress in this virtual prison, alongside indulging in a hobby. Like how Gangle is never seen without a pencil and paper, always drawing in the downtime between each adventure, Ragatha will occasionally knit something; short projects just to keep her hands busy, like handkerchiefs or small swatches for practice. She wasn’t given tools for it though, so she’s been asking Zooble if any of their spare parts could substitute for a decent pair of knitting needles.
And she returns them every time, despite Zooble’s insistence on keeping them. They are technically Zooble’s parts; she’d feel terrible about having some custody over that.
Her mood, positive and high-spirited like nothing else could ruin the rest of her day, is immediately trampled the moment she swings the door open. Behold Jax, the hand holding the key to her door hovering in the air.
“Rags—”
The door slams in his face.
He sounds muffled from the other side, but she can clearly hear the deadpan in his voice. “You know I can just unlock it, right.”
Heaving a sigh, she opens the door reluctantly. Jax is still crouched there, twirling the key around his index finger. “So,” he begins, pointedly not meeting her gaze.
Ragatha crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe. “So?”
“So,” he says, letting his head fall against his shoulder, “don’t you owe me an explanation?”
She’s tempted to grab his ears and twist them until he’s screaming for mercy. The immediacy of that thought scares her, and she shifts uncomfortably, glancing off to the side. “For what, exactly?”
“Oh, so now you’re the one playing dumb.”
Quickly, his deft fingers catch the spinning key in a fist and tuck it back in his pocket. “Way to go, Rags,” he drawls boredly, eyes narrowing in disapproval. “You deserve a medal for being such a big, fat hypocrite."
Ragatha pinches her nose to quell another budding headache. She can already tell this conversation isn’t going anywhere. “Really, Jax? I’m seriously questioning your sanity right now.”
“There’s nothing to question,” he says, finally meeting her eyes. His gaze is steady, no doubt of lucidity in those pupils. “I’m sane. Are you?”
The insinuation that she’s not rips a scoff from her throat. “Of course I am,” she mutters. “You’re just being insufferable and… weird.”
“Weird,” Jax barks out a laugh. “You’ve been calling me that all day without a shred of evidence. I’m starting to doubt your credibility!”
“You of all people have no right to be talking about credibility, of all things,” she cries, dangerously bordering on laughter. She’s past her wits-end, and of course Jax is here to leave her own sanity dangling by a literal thread. “Why do you even care so much?”
Something in her words causes him to tilt his head, eyes huge and unblinking, his voice lowering to a calmer, eerier register.
“If it bothers you this much, then of course I have to know.”
Ragatha knows better than to take those words thinly guised as concern (because when has he ever cared?) at face value. He’s crueler than that. He’s manipulative and cunning and self-absorbed. He derives a sick sense of satisfaction from watching her suffer more than anyone else. It’s what he wants more than anything.
So if it’s an explanation he wants, she'll be extra generous and offer a demonstration instead.
Laying her palm flat over the top of Jax’s head, in one fluid motion, she sweeps her hand back.
She’s never seen Jax’s eyes go that wide.
“Ragatha, what the %!#$.”
The doll doesn’t respond right away. She’s distracted by the soft, velvety feel of his head and how smoothly her hand glides over it. She notices his ears twitch restlessly and, in a moment of blind courage (or is it stupidity?), she scratches them like how she’d pet a dog, or maybe a cat. She’d had plenty of dogs back on the farm, and a copious amount of stray cats loitering around the stables. She likes animals, but it never occurred to her that Jax… well, that he’s technically supposed to be one, too.
She had considered him more of a demon wrongly trapped in an innocent rabbit’s body. It didn’t fit him, nor did it make sense to her or the others given his shitty personality, but perhaps the system was arbitrary and had nothing to do with their innate characteristics.
…Or maybe it does.
Right now, Jax is anything but evil. All protests have died with his pride, his head lowered in humiliation and his fists shaking like he wants to rip Ragatha apart limb by limb but physically can’t.
Like his instincts have taken over all sense, and the only thing he can do is lean into her caress.
“You think this is funny?” He grinds through his teeth, and with his head down, Ragatha can’t tell if he’s supposed to be angry or purring. The position makes it easier for her though, and she takes the opportunity to scratch his cheek with her other hand.
“I think this is gold,” she laughs earnestly.
Jax snaps his head up, seething in anger, embarrassment, emotions running hot, molten red, but Ragatha only sees a bunny with the last of his ego stripped from him.
That, and the embarrassed flush apparent on his cheeks, blazing a bright pink.
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Good luck with that, Thumper.”
“What?” Jax blurts out, glancing down at his traitorous foot, rapidly beating against the floor, in absolute horror.
“Oh man.” His face splits into a manically spiteful grin that keeps cracking under the force of his rage, his mouth twitching between a frown and a smile like his own ripoff of Gangle’s masks. “Oh, wow, good one.”
His foot shows no signs of stopping. If anything, it starts thumping faster and his grin grows wider, more hateful.
“Real $&@#ing good one, Ragatha.” His laughs grow increasingly louder, rocking towards mental instability. “Want a gold %@#&ing medal?”
“You made the same joke twice,” she points out, retracting her hand. Maybe she shouldn’t go too far. She can’t die, but it sure as hell would hurt if Jax actually went through with his threat—
“Don’t.“
Faintly, Jax’s voice tremors and his hand slowly reaches up to grab her wrist, pulling it back to his head. It’s like a switch inside him flipped, turning him docile and attention-greedy.
Stunned can’t even begin to describe how Ragatha feels.
She’s frozen. Too shocked to react or poke fun at him or laugh until her sides hurt, because this. Something she never thought she’d live to see without her eye being gouged out.
She tries pulling back again, and again she’s stopped. But in addition to a hand wrapped around her wrist, a forehead bumps against her palm insistently.
Jax seizes up, as though he hadn’t been in control of his own body. Ragatha freezes too, unsure of whether to proceed or not because she can tell that Jax really, really hates being vulnerable, and this totally isn’t the worst way to bulldoze past his boundaries and coronate her as Public Enemy No. 1 in his mind for as long as they exist in here.
She’s so fucked.
It’s a game now, Ragatha pulling back, Jax butting forward. She thought this would’ve ended the first time she stopped petting him, but it appears that from the very first moment in the broom closet up until now, she’s been digging herself six feet under.
“I’m going to kill you for entirely different reasons now,” Jax mutters in the lapse between their struggle. It’s checkmate, neither of them moving but stuck, and though seeing Jax all soft was entertaining initially, she’s having post-cuteness clarity and regretting all the consequences sure to barrel her way later and for the foreseeable future.
“Excuse me? What—“
Suddenly there are voices coming from down the hallway, and Jax’s ears perk up, his body stiffening. In his neglect, Ragatha manages to steal her hand back, but it’s too late. She’s being shoved into her room and the door’s slamming shut behind her, and worst of all—
Jax is staring down at her with a severity never seen in his eyes before, with seemingly no intentions of moving off of her.
Not until she gives him what he wants.
But when it comes to Jax, she can’t not give him a hard time.
“Since when did you care about what others thought about you?”
“Since you—“ He cuts himself off with a groan, dropping his head to Ragatha’s chest, which makes her heart nearly leap out of her throat and her entire body freeze up, for whatever reason. She can unpack that later. Or never. Maybe never. “God, this is so stupid,” he mumbles against the collar of her dress, and for that same elusive reason, Ragatha feels compelled to pet him on the back of the head.
Immediately she cringes, but Jax can’t see her, and for once, she’s grateful for this.
She inhales a breath, but Jax makes a muffled noise against her before she can speak.
“Don’t you dare say a word,” he mutters.
She answers with a soft pat between his ears, and he seems to agree with the action, relaxing his body in response to her gentle touch.
“To anyone,” he murmurs defeatedly, and Ragatha nods. No more words need to be said. It’s only a gut feeling, but it feels like they’ve come to a mutual understanding, a compromise.
As she pets the bunny in her arms, Ragatha stares up at the ceiling, often her companion for dark nights spent in solitude. Nothing about it has changed, its texture, its color. Its emptiness staring back at her, a mockery of what she truly craves. The reality of what she regrettably lacks.
But tonight, with an unusual companion pressed against her beating heart, she doesn’t need to think about her loneliness, her insecurities, the pain of being unwanted in a place where everyone else has found their pair, except for her.
Tonight, she doesn’t need to explain herself. She can let go of the tight reins she holds herself in. She can finally stop thinking, and when she needs to, it’ll be with a clearer head.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and Jax stirs slightly in her embrace. She isn’t quite sure who her words were directed to, if none at all.
But that hardly matters. For once in this simulated life, sleep finds her easily: dreamless, noiseless, and free.