Chapter Text
“Do you think we’re dead?” she asks. He looks over, squinting a little like he usually does, pretending her nonsensical form is merely a trick of the light.
He hates it when she asks questions like that. She gets mad when he doesn’t answer, and upset when she does, and he doesn’t know why she has to do things like this. Why she has to ruin a perfectly fake night sky.
He imagines plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, stuck to a plaster ceiling with wall putty, and it’s not that different, actually.
“I don’t know,” he says. His voice sounds too loud. It feels weird in his throat. He thinks he’d like it if his throat just closed up one day, and then he wouldn’t have to bother with breathing or talking or any of that. He could just be.
The grass beneath them feels plastic, but most things do. Maybe it’s just him. Maybe this body can’t process anything real.
“Come on,” she says, and she rolls over and grabs his shoulders with her hands—too bright too large too long too vague why doesn’t she have nails how horrifying would it be if she did—and she stares directly at him. He squints harder, and watches her wail through half-closed eyes. “Come on, come on, come on, come on.”
He just sits there, stiff as a toy, until she finishes her rant and lets go of him as quickly as she reached out. She rolls onto her back, flopping down, and folds her hands under her head, pointedly not looking at him.
She’s upset, now. He’s displeased her. He doesn’t really like that, but he knows what he’ll need to do to fix it and he doesn’t like that either. He doesn’t feel like it, not now, not here.
She’ll forget soon, anyway.
“Do you like me?” she asks after a few minutes. His response is quick, eager. He knows this. He can do this.
“Yes,” and it’s honest. “More than anyone.”
“You’re not a bunny at all, huh?” she questions, and if she asked him he’d show her his throat and tell her how he needs to be hurt, so maybe not. Maybe he’s not good prey. But he certainly isn’t a hunter, so what then?
“Do you miss your life?” she asks.
“This is my life,” he says.
“But this isn’t real.”
It isn’t. It’s so fake he wishes he could vomit it all up, let mucus fill his throat and stopper up his breath, and then they’d see. Then they’d all see.
“I hated my life,” he admits. “I hated myself. I had no one. I was no one.
“Here there’s you,” he adds, unprompted.
“You’re so stupid,” she says, but she doesn’t sound that upset. Mostly just agitated. “What if we met out there?”
“You wouldn’t like me,” comes the automatic response. “You like Jax.”
“You like Ribbit.”
“I like you. Always. I promise.”
“Yeah, yeah, bunny,” she sighs, and he wishes he could make it better but he isn’t sure what he’s done. She’s been weird lately. He doesn’t know what he’s done. “Would you love me?”
“Of course.”
“Would you $&@% me?”
The word comes out as a squawk, but it isn’t like he doesn’t know what she means. He doesn’t play dumb. He’s dumb enough accidentally, she tells him. Stupid to try to be dumber. “I wouldn’t deserve to.”
She smirks. She’s staring straight up and he’s curled up on his side, looking at her, so he only sees half of it. He wonders if the other half’s doing something different. Maybe she hates him halfway. Maybe she’s scowling.
He doesn’t sit up to check. He doesn’t really care.
“You’d earn it,” she says sweetly. “I’d teach you how. You’d make me happy, again and again and again. Do you know how?”
He thinks about lying in the same vague way he thinks about killing her. “Yes. I had a…this girl, we slept together a few times. And a few guys. But they didn’t come back.”
He means to. He really, really means to. He wants it so desperately it feels like he’s melting, but it’s not like he knows how to, so he doesn’t. And then things move in.
“Do you have a tongue, bunny?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“Me neither,” she concedes, and they’re silent again.
“I was an ugly person,” he says finally. It doesn’t burst out, exactly, but the words are as inevitable as air escaping from a pierced balloon. “You wouldn’t have liked me.”
“I was very pretty,” she says shamelessly. “I used to be beautiful. But I never let anyone touch me. I thought, oh, I’m too good for them. I deserve someone devoted. I wanted to save myself for my soulmate, and I thought they’d have done the same, and we’d get married and that would be it for me. I was so stupid, waiting and waiting and waiting, and now I’ll never have that. And I don’t even know what it’s like to be touched.”
“Did you touch yourself?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Can you…still?”
“No,” she sighs. “I’ve tried. It’s…nothing’s there.”
He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t dare to. Eventually she laughs, short and bitter.
“I’ve never even been kissed!”
“I would kiss you,” he offers.
“You don’t even have lips,” she despairs. “You’re plastic, bunny, and I’m molding. You’ll live forever and I’ll die in a day.”
“I don’t like your metaphors,” he whispers, and she scoffs, her face turning angry.
“Don’t be so childish,” she snaps. “You’re supposed to be funny!”
He’s trying. $#%@, he’s trying.
It’s just that none of this is very funny.
“I can open my mouth if I try,” he mumbles. “I could…we could try.”
She sits up, turning to face him, and he sits up too because he knows that he should, and then she bites his cheek.
“There,” she says grumpily. “That’s as close as we can get.”
“Do it again,” he says.
“What? It didn’t do anything, did you even feel it?”
“Not much,” he admits. “Bite harder.”
She gives him an odd sort of look, and takes his purple face in her distorted hands, and her teeth sink into his face and then she tears away quickly enough that it should’ve shredded his face.
It doesn’t even leave a mark. But he feels it.
“Again,” he says. It’s breathier. She doesn’t comment. She isn’t scowling anymore and she isn’t smiling, but he thinks maybe that doesn’t matter. “Again.”
She reaches down for one of his hands, and he slips it into hers easily, and she brings it to her mouth and shoves the whole thing inside.
Her mouth is dry and warm. His fingers straighten automatically as her teeth snap down on his wrist, right over where a vein should be.
“Bite me, bunny,” she says, releasing his arm, and it’s stupid how easy he find it to stretch his mouth open and clamp his pointed teeth over her mouth. He jolts back a few seconds later, startled by his own boldness, and she shoves him to the ground, crawling forward onto him as they do their level best to eat each other.
“Again,” he pants. “Again.”
“Jax,” she gasps, and she smashes her face against his, falling into his chest as she does, her arms going from propping herself up to clutching at the straps of his overalls. “Oh, €%#$.”
Their plastic smiles bounce unforgivably off each other. Jax has no lips to pucker. His tongue is as thin as paper.
Ribbit’s mouth is as real as her red cheeks. Painted and hard.
He bites her again, so he doesn’t have to think about it anymore, and she writhes uselessly on top of him. He shoves himself up, and she stays put, so now she’s half on his lap and slotting their legs together. He doesn’t know why she bothers, but he doesn’t stop her. Just lets her fruitlessly grind her smooth, bare crotch against his own.
“You’re a fucking Ken,” she groans, and he wraps his arms around her, squeezing as tightly as he can. “Jax. Jax.”
“You can bite me again if you want,” he says desperately, quickly, but as quickly as she fells onto him she’s unwinding her limbs and slipping off his lap, backing up a few paces until she lets herself fall to the floor in a defeated slump. “You can—“
“Shut up, bunny,” she orders him, and he falls silent. “That was so stupid.”
He wants her teeth in him again. He wants to feel her body pressed against his toy form. He wants to undo his pink overalls and let her bite him all over without the barrier of synthetic fabric.
“You can talk now,” she tells him, much, much later.
“Would you let me touch you?” he asks immediately. “If we were real?”
She laughs, soft and mean. She’s sitting up again, arms wrapped around her knees, and he’s lying down and gazing up at her. She looks like a god. He probably looks like an idiot.
“No,” she says, smiling bitterly. “You’re not my soulmate.”
She’s probably his, but that goes unsaid.
“If we were still here?” he tries.
“Why do you even want me?” she groans. “I’m—I’m mean, and I know you’re, like, pathetic, but—“
“I can be different if you want,” he offers easily. Jax is like that. Jax is quick to don, effortless to change, easy to rewrite. Jax used to be nervous and nosy, the perfect newcomer, until he decided that wasn’t the right story and Jax became one of the gang. Groaning and complaining on adventures, rolling his eyes at Kinger, switching between mocking and trusting Ragatha until he got too bored of that.
Until Ribbit and Kaufmo decided he’d do. Then Jax was funny, because they were too. That’s what brought them together.
Kaufmo is funny because he likes it, he enjoys a good performance and he likes how people treat him after he’s put on a show. He likes to make them laugh, their eyes never leaving his face, and he embraces it.
Ribbit is funny because she likes to be looked at. She likes people to stare. She likes to be mean, because she’s right, she is a mean kind of person, and she wants to be. She likes being funny. It makes her laugh.
Jax is mostly just funny because it bores him to be anything else. Besides, Ribbit likes him for it.
“What do you want?” she asks again.
“I want you to peg me,” he admits, and she bursts out laughing. The bad part is he’s serious. The worst part is she knows it.
“Can you imagine?” Ribbit chuckles, and yes, he very much can. He can imagine kneeling before her, undressing while she watches and putting on a show to win her approval, climbing into the bed and watching while she carefully chooses a strap-on and gets herself ready. She’ll punish him for blinking, and he’ll take it, and he’ll suck her silicone cock until it’s dripping with his saliva. He won’t get any other lubrication, even though later she’ll coat her fingers in it before making him watch her fuck herself, another reminder that he doesn’t deserve that. But she’ll fuck him raw and it’ll hurt, and he’ll feel it and she won’t, not really, and in the morning he’ll lie very still under the covers and wait for her to shower before getting up, not because he doesn’t want her to notice but because he wants to pretend she would’ve asked, if he had gotten up. He’ll limp to his own room. He’ll probably do it again.
“Would you fuck me?” Ribbit asks curiously.
“I wouldn’t deserve to.”
“Would you want to?”
She’s never asked that one before. He isn’t sure of the right answer. “I wouldn’t want to deserve it. I would want to work for it forever.”
Eventually he’ll die. She’ll probably die first. Kaufmo will probably fade away with her, there’s no need for another act if the show’s already closing.
“I don’t want to be here forever,” she says. “I want to get fucked.”
He kind of just wants to exist for a little bit.
“I can’t fuck you anyway,” he says, and he relishes it in when she bites him.