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The first thing Ragatha noticed about the real world was the quiet.
No circus music looping in the background, no glitching bright lights, just the soft hum of traffic and wind brushing through the trees outside the little cafe.
She sat by the window, fingers curled around a mug she hadn’t remembered touching. Everything felt strange. Real, but distant, like waking up from a dream.
Months of internet forums, social media, and searching (in ways that beat around the bush about what she had experienced so she didn't get institutionalized) had lead to this. Ragatha, in a blue dress, hair curled and neatly tied back with a bow, sitting in a cafe she'd never been to before.
The door chimed.
Ragatha didn’t look up at first.
But then she heard a voice she knew too well.
“Wow. So this is what you look like out here.”
Her head snapped up.
A man stood in the doorway, hands in the pockets of a worn jacket, a familiar crooked grin on his face—but softer now, less sharp around the edges.
For a moment neither of them moved.
“Jax?” she said quietly.
“Hey, dollface.”
He walked over and slid into the seat across from her like no time had passed at all.
But it had.
A lot of it.
They just stared at each other for a second.
“You’re… real,” Ragatha said.
“Pretty sure,” Jax replied. “Unless this is some extra-cruel bonus level.”
She laughed a little. Half relief, half disbelief.
Outside, a car passed. Someone on the street was playing music from their phone. Two passing dogs got their leashes all twisted up and the eyes of their owners met. The world kept moving like nothing strange had ever happened.
“I kept thinking,” Ragatha said, tracing the rim of her mug, “when we got out… I’d forget everything.”
"Woah. No small-talk? Just getting into it all?"
Ragatha blinked, before flushing anxiously
"Oh! Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I-... how are you?"
"I'm kidding, Rags."
They sit in silence for a moment.
Ragatha is thinking about how comforting it is to be called that when she's a human person made of flesh and bones, and Jax is thinking about how similar she looks.
Neither of them will say anything about that for now.
“Well, did you?”
"Hm?"
"Forget everything."
She shook her head.
“Not you.”
Jax leaned back, pretending to look unimpressed, but his eyes brightened.
“Wow,” he said. “Out of all the traumatic memories, I’m the one that stuck?”
Ragatha smiled faintly.
“It wasn’t like that.”
He tilted his head. “Then what was it like?”
She thought for a moment.
“In... there. Everything felt fake. But sometimes, when we were talking, or arguing, or when you’d say something awful just to make me laugh…”
She looked up at him.
“That felt real.”
Jax didn’t respond right away.
The grin he usually wore like armour had faded. Now he just looked… thoughtful.
“Funny,” he muttered. “I was gonna say the same thing.”
Ragatha blinked.
“What?”
“Yeah, don’t make a big deal out of it,” he said quickly. “But when I got out… everything here felt kinda empty.”
He glanced out the window.
“Like something was missing.”
“And?” Ragatha asked softly.
Jax looked back at her.
“Then I saw you sitting here. And recognized you. In my defence, how could I not recognize you when you've got your whole usual getup going on."
She laughed softly in embarrassment about her outfit choice. A small smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
“...And suddenly it wasn’t so empty anymore.”
Ragatha’s cheeks warmed.
For a second, the world outside the cafe blurred into background noise.
“Do you think,” she said carefully, “that maybe… we kept remembering each other for a reason?”
Jax raised an eyebrow.
“Are you saying fate dragged us through a nightmare circus just so we could grab coffee?”
She giggled.
“Well… when you put it like that—”
“I’m not complaining,” he interrupted.
Their eyes met.
For the first time since leaving the circus, nothing felt surreal or distant.
Just two people sitting across from each other in the quiet afternoon.
And the strange, lingering feeling that somehow, even after everything, they had always been thinking about each other.