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The nineteenth time you see him, you promptly get clocked in the head with a cereal box not long after.
“Keep your eyes up!” Ragatha shouts, Jax following her up with a “Yeah, Ragatha , would’ja?” as he checks her with his kart and speeds ahead with reckless abandon. Ragatha barely has a second to turn back to you and offer an encouraging thumbs-up after she’s given the hare a good glare. “You’re still ahead of the NPCs! That’s good! Just – try to focus on not crashing before you try strategic crashing –”
Again Jax comes up from behind her and checks her; harder this time, having circled back just for the sake of rubbing it in. Ragatha mutters something at him that you can’t make out and Jax offers nothing but a sneer in return – and soon they’re off, leaving you in the wake of their traded jabs.
Little does Ragatha know – you’re actually not doing too bad at the whole strategic crashing thing. You don’t entirely know why you keep trying this strategy out – you remember dryly muttering not long ago that you’d like to avoid a repeat of what’s happened with Gummigoo – but you find the urge is automatic. When you’d seen him reborn in the ugly fluorescent light of Spudsy’s, it was all you could think to do; trailing after him like a dog, heart thumping like a wagging tail, calling him by a name that’s long since stopped being his. You don’t know if any of them could be called him. Not really.
Each time, when you see him –
You’d only seen it for a moment, but you’d recognize it anywhere; that long brown hat pulled over that long snout. That’s all you need to see to know now – you’ve seen it often enough to be able to tell him apart from his fellow gators. And the gravelly tone of his voice only proves you right – one of said gators calls to him that you’re lagging behind and he calls back an affirmative “ten-four, mate! I got ‘er.”
You turn back to watch him come – road safety’s long since become the last thing on your mind. Is that the same way the Gummigoo you met clutched the wheel of his truck? Did he lean forward, his eyes narrowing with determined grit, as he hit the gas? You don’t remember. You remember hands clasped around the barrel of a gun that looked like a toy. You remember hands gripping reigns, whipping them in time with his shouts. You remember hands tapping against plastic patterned after wood; each fingerfall as casual as any other ordinary day.
Did he do those things every time–? How long has it been since the first time–? Time as a concept is like water to you now; making everything around you blur and fade away as you fall back into its formlessness and send it rippling. The fluorescent lights make everything look like a sea of pale colors – a welcome change from the kiddie playpen brightness of everything else. Your limbs are numb to any sense of touch.
Only he remains pictured clearly, the sole object of your focus. His words – unremarkable as they are – ring like bells inside your skull. His voice is like the call of a siren. There are places where his inflection feels familiar – but even where it isn’t it’s stretched out over a more unrecognizable rhythm the sound’s always the same. Low, warm. Rich like honey. A crackling fire; two arms wrapped strong and tight around your back.
Every action is sorted in a file folder in your mind; columns reading posture and attitude and idle anima– there’s gotta be another word for that. Variables. There can’t be an infinite amount. At some point, they should line back up the way they did the first time – your Gummigoo back together again. Then you can scoop him up, keep good on your promises, and finally get out of here.
When you’d seen him reborn in the ugly fluorescent light, it was all you could think to do; go to him all instinct, let your body be drawn into his pull;
fly through the air as he speeds past, ragdolling pathetically over the top of an aisle as you’re reminded that the rest of the world doesn’t actually bend to the whims of your attempts to make sense of it.
Sometimes you wonder what it would be like to bring him out into the physical world with you.
You can guess at some of them – Ragatha is prob’ly just as much the pale redhead as she is in here, maybe with some freckles. Jax, tall and wiry; always grinning like he’s in on a joke you aren’t. And Kinger wouldn’t be Kinger without his slouch.
Would Gummigoo’s skin be light-colored or dark-colored? His hair? How would it feel to run your hands along his face, no longer bound by unremovable gloves or exaggerated snouts? Or – for him to run his hands along yours? You try to will the feeling forth in whatever margin this place’s bizzaro logic will allow. You try for something grounded – but in the end you picture callouses from a bandit’s life, bandages that’ve long past needed changing. Nothing matching your vague recollection of the boring dregs you’d come up from.
Ragatha and Jax are your go-tos about it; Ragatha because she somehow seems to like you best, Jax because you know he won’t sugarcoat. Sometimes, you manage to wrangle both of them, thoughts of how impermanent life here is – if you could even call it that – drowned out by their bickering when they’re not drawn attention to by an “I really don’t know why you keep going to me instead of just her . You got some kinda death wish?”
“Very funny,” you mutter. But he’s right – sometimes you think about abstracting just to have some form of out from where you’ve ended up. If you did, you’d finally stop fearing for what might wait for you around the corner; a yellow-green light you can’t help chasing in spite of the way your hands always shake and your mind always rockets back to that lifeless shell at the belly of this world. Push the impulse to the edge and watch it fall down into the abyss, gone with your consciousness into the black. Save the trouble of knowing you should hold yourself back;
IN JUST THREE EASY STEPS!
OVERLOAD!
OVERHEAT!
CRASH!
“If you do,” Ragatha amends quickly, twining her fingers with yours, “we’re here for you, alright? We don’t want to lose you too.”
You too.
You twine your fingers with hers in turn.
Sleep is the closest you can get to it; the consciousness pouring out of you not unlike that black blinking geyser. Close being the operative there.
That night you dream about a house of mirrors, reflecting not you but him. Each one is slightly different than the others – distorted just a bit too tall or just a bit too short, none of them looking at you quite the same way. You stumble through the halls with your breath heavy in your chest, watching them all as they press against the glass in desperation to escape.
POMNI!
they call to you with one voice.
They always have the same voice.
POMNI!
They always sound like him.
At the sudden sound you trip and fall backwards – nausea overtaking you when you realize one of him had tried to catch you from the other side of the cool glass you’d fallen against.
POMNI!
POMNI!
POMNI!
“AH – Jax?” You blink at the tall shadow leaning against your doorway. How late–? When you go to turn to look at the clock you’re quickly met with a face-full of wall; your back is pressed against it, your new body twisted up in a knot only it could achieve.
“Napping as usual, I see,” he remarks, tossing you a sly grin as he sets one hand on his hip and gestures to someone outside with the other. “”What’d I tell you?”
A margin scrawl of something you’d seen in a PC game commercial, maybe. That’d be a bit more realistic. You always did have an eye for good character design.
Caine sweeps you away in spectacular fashion.
“Are you – doing this on purpose?”
“Not at all – too tight?” Caine asks. You wish it were easier to get mad at him; but there’s always a genuine lilt to his voice, and his head cocks to the side in a mechanical manner that makes the eyeballs inside clatter loudly. “How about this?”
With a snap of his fingers, the stiff corset around your waist is traded out for a shapeless rectangle of fabric that drapes over you like a blanket. “No, I –” You stop. “It’s–”
“No! No. Don’t tell me,” he turns away in one snap, holding up both of his hands. “Not tight enough! Oh, Caine, you always do think in absolutes.” He raps his fist against his head as he slowly turns back to you, producing another loud clatter.
You relent. It’s not like he would understand anyways – his thinking is really just a bunch of someone else’s math. And really – you know better. But there’s only so far you can get in thinking about waiting out the RNG and hedging all your bets on it before the implications catch up to you. On purpose would mean there’s something living and breathing beneath it that you could extract; and that fills in the empty space that comes between betting against lady luck and –
In the end you choose a ballgown so voluminous you’re nearly drowning in it. It’s white, decorated with clear crystals; it reminds you faintly of a movie you think might’ve been your favorite before you’d come here. In that movie, the girl in the dress had seemed mostly uncomfortable in it, but you’d always been jealous that she got to wear anything like it at all. Your hair remains a plastic mound covered by your jester’s hat, keeping it from being anything close to a fulfilled wish on Caine’s part – but it’ll do, you figure. Better than the other options.
The fiftieth time you see him, you barely eat.
One; since you don’t need to eat here, you can more than afford to cut your losses when you’re not up for it. The plate that’s just been set in front of you is piled with colorful orbs in nonspecific textures and large slabs of misshapen pink – something. If you squint a little, it does its job in having a bit of a food-ish shape, but that doesn’t exactly help your appetite.
Two; you aren’t looking at the food for very long anyhow, because your attention locks on to the hand setting down your plate as soon as you see it.
Dualtone green and yellow. Flecked with speckles of the low light. Undeniably gummy.
You’ve got half a mind to reach across the table and grab it. But you don’t. You’re struck stiff. You only let yourself look from his hand up to him when he says “you, eh, want me to trade it out for something else? There’s some extra chocolate soup in the back waitin’ on –”
“Don’t tell me he reused that, too–”
“Gross. Hey – I’ll take two bowls.”
You reach over and slap Jax’s elbow away before it can elbow him. You’ve moved. Specifically, you’ve thrown your body across the table. Jax doesn’t seem to mind – “Easy, there, hot-shot,” he drawls, “I’m not gonna eat him. Maybe you, though, ‘f you keep laying there looking like a creampuff with rabies.”
To make his point, he pokes your arm with a fork. You don’t feel it – just see the give in your skin where the metal points press against it. What you feel is Gummigoo’s eyes– no, just this Gummigoo’s – either way, it’s – his – his eyes – he watches you, brow furrowed, nudging the last tray in his hands against your side.
“Don’t want you getting eaten, m’am,” he says, a half-hearted laugh. You’ve seen that before; the way his mouth turns up at one corner, like he’s trying to smile but can’t get the gumption to do so all the way.
Your mind stutters to piece it into your plan. Half-smile – you know that one. His hat’s still there too. But those are always consistent – and his tone is softer and quieter than the one you first heard his voice in. The accent, too, is more reserved. His arms are – were they always this strong? – and you stare maybe longer than you should at the fabric of his suit – two-toned too – shifting over their movement.
The rest of the world goes blurry again in the wake of your focus – you can’t feel the table underneath you anymore. The food surrounding you grows more shapeless in the periphery of your vision. Your skirts are swallowing you. The feeling in your limbs doesn’t quite part from you this time; instead it all sinks down to the bottom of them, like they’ve magnets in them that want to cling to him by the very laws of their design. The sound of banter from the table grows distant,
save for
“‘was gonna set you back down proper in your seat, but – not to be stickin’ my nose where it doesn’t belong, but you don’t look so good. Hey – you there?”
All at once your feet connect with the ground and ground you. “I’m– here, yes,” you stammer, looking around to find that here has changed since you were last paying attention.
The table chatter doesn’t just sound distant – it is distant, framed now by the end of a long carpeted hall. Instinct makes you turn over your shoulder the other way, and as you expected the other end of it just stretches on until all the walls and floor seem to converge. The chandelier over the table’s not much more than a distant beacon in the dimness; there isn’t quite a shadow cast over you as you face the light; instead, you’re caught in a sort of peach-pink haze, translucent yellow over a sea of red décor.
“You – okay? Somethin’ you wanted to – I mean, eh,” he wrings his hands. He’s – you can hardly bear to look him in the eye now that you’re alone, so you stare at them, his palms still papered over in thin little lines. Those scars don’t come from anywhere, you think. Just facets of the design.
“What makes you think I’m not okay?” Your words tumble out before you can stop them, an over-explanation already addressed. You identify in him an underlying steadiness that’d remained even in his less familiar iterations; in you, there’s currently a bubbling you’ve never figured out what to do with even though you’ve had it all your life. “You can stick your nose wherever you like – I mean, I don’t have anything you could intrude on. Well – unless you count –”
– how you’re reminded of the irony, the role reversal. But you can’t just say that – you don’t even know if this Gummigoo knows what a double-double with a large with ice is, or if he’d assume you were making an innuendo and get weirded out about it. But what’s more important is that you can’t tell him
what – that he’s one of some hundred reflections of himself? That was what started this mess, and that was without the part about him not being the one you’re looking for. Instinct stops you here just as it’d brought you here at all with one simple truth –
“That, for one,” he answers.
You almost ask him what he means, but find the answer in your mouth already. Laughter has cascaded off the end of your attempt at brushing off the concern. And now, more consciously, you’re laughing at the fact that you’re laughing. It really is the only option you can take here that won’t – this part’s funny, too – blow up in your face.
You watch the concern in his eyes. His hands flex, unsure of what you’d react to best; his mouth opens just enough to close again. He reaches out to you and your spine goes tense – enough to stop your laughter, apparently, as his settling into the act proves. “Dunno if this’ll help any,” he mutters. “Just lemme know if I’m–”
You collapse. It’s all you can do when you hear it. He starts for a second before he’s caught you in his arms again; though – ha! You can still feel the hesitance, the lack of any real familiarity, as he begins to rub the tips of his claws light in circles on your back.
You must be balking up at him, because he smiles again, that little half-smile. “Not gonna leave a lady hanging,” he jokes, voice still soft. “Even a strange lil’ stranger of one. What kind’a waiter would I be if I didn’t do at least a little bit of waiting on?”
It’s like getting smacked around by a revolving door. You hold up your hands to try and stop it, and they end up on either side of his snout. It’s different than the few foggy memories you have of holding other folks’ faces like this. Novel. Unfortunate – that it had to happen this way and not in your room, with a Gummigoo you’d been able to successfully bring there, curled up in some scrap of stability. Unfortunate, generally speaking.
You feel like a fool. You’re no stranger to wanting what you can’t have – you’re an adult, you’ve had your share, and this world is tried in the art of showing you how little of what you want you’ll ever get – and so this shouldn’t get to you as bad as all this. It shouldn’t.
But when the lights go out –
– when they return to reveal a pile of confetti in your hands –
– you’re not thinking about tonight’s apparent whodunnit for most of its duration. You’re still thinking about the way it felt to make contact again with the source of the pull.
That night you lie awake, trying to tip off from the edge of drowsiness into the great black sea of dream.
The attempt;
A man that doesn’t exist standing next to you, hands folded over the ledge of an office building’s roof. You, holding a cigarette in your shaking hands. Two ill-fitting ties. One pair of rolled-up sleeves, exposing half-bandaged forearms.
“Want one?” You offer, turning to him.
“Nah,” he shakes his head. His breath mingles with yours. “Think you got enough of that habit for the both of us.”