Chapter Text
1. the joking voice, a gesture I love
Gangle doesn't like to talk about it, but Zooble really wants to know. The questions come as easy as ice cream.
What's your mother's name? Did you hate sports in high school, too? What were your friends like? How'd you get into drawing? Where was your community college, and did you like your professors? Why did you drop out? What's your favorite book? What did you do for fun? How did you end up here---
Gangle has to remind herself that Zooble is freshly twenty-two and a circus fledgling, having only been liberated from the world of flesh and blood and sex and death for a few months. It's only natural that they want to stay connected to the life they lived out there, a life that had only just begun.
She remembers how it was during her own first few months and years here; how she lay in her bed of pixels fluttering over sharply-vectored lines in a tasseled red room, reciting her home phone number, the names of her mother and aunts and cousins, the year she was born, the year she graduated high school, each character in Azumanga Daioh (Chiyo, Osaka, Tomo, Kagura, Sakaki, Yomi) clenching each one in her teeth as though she were praying a rosary, over and over again until she'd fall asleep.
She went on like this for the first few years, but it was hopeless in the end. Places, cities, faces, names--once as vivid as the feverish neon colors of the Digital Circus--slowly fell away, until they were nothing more than dreams, slipping away into darkness by dawn. Outlines of memories, artifacts from another life, moving strangely and slowly as if suspended in water with the sound turned down low.
Gangle wants to tell Zooble that she can't remember much at all: not her mother's name, not her favorite book, not her classes. That she's twenty-six, that she's been twenty-six, that high school was a lifetime behind her. She wants to tell Zooble that it's useless, that the Circus stole her memories as surely as it stole her humanity, and that none of them have escaped it in the end, but Zooble still says when I get home instead of if, so she just doesn't say anything at all.
Zooble, on the other hand, doesn't believe Gangle should be allowed to avoid their questions. They don't take her silence for an answer. They are walking and talking down the hallway to their rooms when Zooble gets the itch, and this time they don’t let her get away.
They gently corner her against the wall, their outstretched arms flanking her head. Two more sets of arms and hands hold her in place as she shrinks and shutters herself up like an old, abandoned house, tears suddenly gathering at the corners of her mask.
Hey, they say softly, half-lidded eyes gazing down at her. Look, I broke out a second pair of arms just for this.
Gangle looks confused, maybe a little embarrassed, her cheeks are beaming as a rose-colored flush forms beneath her eyes.
Zooble? She asks.
Tell me just one thing, they say. I want to know. I need to know.
But, Gangle can only hang her head. She feels Zooble sigh against her, a ghostly outline of wind, of lungs, of circulatory systems. She feels their hand grip and caress her own, the feeling of plastic scraping against satin.
Please, they're pleading now, please tell me you can remember one thing about your life out there.
Gangle wraps her ribbons snug around Zooble's lower arms.
(Chiyo, Osaka, Tomo, Kagura, Sakaki, Yomi)
That's all I have she whispers, big, blue tears winnowing down her cheek. She lets her mask fall against the garish yellow thorax where once they had a chest. Zooble exhales.
Okay, they say, chuckling, then start with that.
And for the first time that day, Gangle lifts her gaze.