Chapter Text
The abstraction drifts. It does not sleep. It did once, it sometimes recalls. Before. Now there is no barrier between waking and sleeping. It curls in the soothing silence of its dark cocoon and drifts within the shards of its own brokenness. It is peaceful. Empty. Lonely. Safe.
Motion. Sound. A flutter of light. The abstraction stirs, then rises, opening more of its eyes with a static hiss of approval. A familiar shape has entered its nest.
The shape startles at its movement, but quickly relaxes. Familiar mannerisms, a familiar pattern of thought and emotion radiating from it in gentle waves.
Yes, this shape is the one called Pomni.
The abstraction does not tolerate intrusions well. The world outside the dark halo of its nest is a violent burning hurricane of light and sound and thought. The living shapes that move through it blaze too bright. The abstraction sometimes catches flashes of broken memory, a dream of a dream, when it had walked amongst those gods and monsters, and it had been almost tolerable then. Sometimes it was even good. Now their very presence is an attack on its raw, unbound senses. It cannot bear the way they shine.
The shape called Pomni shines too, but the abstraction does not mind. Not if it's her. There is a sweetness to the sharpness of her presence, like the sting of a needle delivering anesthetic.
As her shape rustles past and rearranges the draping borders of its little world all of the abstraction's eyes swivel towards her, eager to witness her from every angle. It is pleased by the shape of her. Not so much her avatar, which is pleasant but unremarkable; rather the complex majesty of the code bound inside it.
Without a form, there are no barriers on the abstraction's perception and the code of Pomni's being is laid bare to its sight. As always it cannot look away, enthralled by the crystalline order of her. She is tiny, a bright star in the endless night that twinkles but does not break the hold of darkness. Yet there is so much inside coiled and folded inside of her unique configuration. It drinks in the glimmering glassy planes of her clarity and conviction, slanted to refract the shafts of light strobing from the delicate gossamer matrix of emotion shot through with glittering threads of thought and memory. The beauty and complexity of her pattern is soothing and captivating. She is a perpetually self-creating work of art.
The abstraction sees all of this and knows none of it. It cannot grasp such concrete concepts. It only knows the experience of being near her, and that it could spend forever contemplating her and be content.
"Man, I thought they'd never leave,” the Pomni mutters with a sigh, peeking one last time through the curtains before pulling them shut. Then she turns and her voice warms. She is smiling inside and out. “Hey, Jax.”
The sounds she makes are high and soft. They vibrate over the abstraction's fractured shards so that they shimmer and chime with her sweetness. Bliss. The only discordant note is the sound called "Jax". It skitters on a cold thrill of dread across the abstraction’s edges, scraping like knives.
The abstraction abhors the memory of the thing that was “Jax”. It was a weak, shameful, distorted failure. Ill-made, despised, wrong. Poisonous. Its broken afterimage gleams like a threat in every jagged fragment of the abstraction's broken order, haunting it, infesting it. Disgusting. Pitiful. Dangerous. Unworthy.
Yet when the Pomni calls for the Jax, there is no fear or disgust. The sound is warm, wanting, wistful as a prayer. If the abstraction focuses all its eyes into the core of her, it perceives a radiant thread of lilac pulsing with steady golden light. It twines through the middle of her, and when she calls for the Jax it throbs with bittersweet dissonance.
How can something as pure and good as the Pomni long for something as unbearable and unlovable as the Jax? It's like a coding error, but the abstraction cannot perceive any error within the Pomni. It would be a real puzzle if the abstraction could conceptualize such a thing. Or if it cared. It doesn't. It only wants to revel in her soft glow and gentle cadence.
The Pomni has rearranged herself onto the soft floor of the abstraction's nest, crossing her lower appendages and leaning back on the upper, and begins whispering her charming sounds into its shadows.
"Sorry I'm late," she says. "It's been a weird day. Gangle is on another one of her comic binges, she had storyboards scattered all over the floor when this stray gloink popped up in the bug terrarium..."
The abstraction doesn't always understand her words, and sometimes it drifts, but it catches ideas now and then. It opens more eyes and curls in a wide arc around her, the better to bask in her nearness as she unfolds a story from the world beyond.
"...and Kinger was still trying to catch the last few paper wasps, but Ragatha was worried the whole pile was going to catch on fire, and she was pacing around with this huge fire hose she had conjured, muttering about brush burning regulations in rural Missouri. Gangle looked ready to commit murder, I think she might actually have tackled her, but then Zooble finally came back with the glue traps. It was really funny, like something out of a movie, they actually threw Gangle over their shoulder and carried her away kicking and screaming. She just kept yelling something about inking the whole way back."
Her laugh rippled through the abstraction, generating shivers of delight.
"You... heh, it was so cringe, you’d never have let them live it down.” The laughter turns to a quiet chuckle. “...I mean, if you weren't too busy trying to feed the gloink after midnight, or playing with matches in the middle of the wasp nest just to make Ragatha have a panic attack or something…”
The Pomni is still laughing, but her light flutters, bittersweet. She is happy and sad at once, gentle and strong, a beacon in the void of night. The abstraction flutters with her.
“Anyway,” she clears her throat, “so now there are gloink traps at all the entrances, Caine is making a new room for Kinger's terrarium and Gangle isn't allowed to store paint thinner under the sofa anymore. All's well that ends well, I guess.” Her face lights with an easy smile as her gaze travels from one of its eyes to the next and the next and so on, examining every aspect of it. Searching for something. The longer this goes on, the more her light begins to dim. Only a fraction, but the abstraction is nothing but eyes. It sees too much.
At length the Pomni looks away “Oh yeah, uhm, remember the new island I was telling you about?” The abstraction does not, but it likes the way her light spikes back up at the thought. “Caine helped me put the finishing touches on it,” she says. “It's the first one I designed and built pretty much on my own. I based it on a place I used to visit when I was a kid." Her smile turns inward as a flurry of memories spark and swirl through her matrix. . "It's not much, kind of just a private little self-indulgent retreat. But I'm kinda proud of it. It’s nice.”
The lilac thread pulses again. Its golden light flickers against the darkness, and the abstraction must work hard to keep from trembling in pain as the fragments of what was once the Jax twitch towards that light like a thousand tiny twisting knives.
“But... if I'm honest,” she says, voice dropping low enough to be more felt than heard, “the whole time I was designing it, I just kept thinking of how perfect it would be if... if I could bring you there. Just… just you and me. I wish you were there with me…”
The Pomni sighs as her light flickers again.
"Sorry, I don't know why I'm being such a wet blanket. It’s just I… god, I know you're still right here, but sometimes..." her voice drops even lower and a billowing swell of grief dulls her light. Her voice falters and one appendage rises to clench tight over the lilac thread. It pulses fitfully and the shard of the Jax shiver like leaves in a breeze. "... sometimes I miss you... so much. It gets… lonely.”
"Don't get me wrong," she adds. "I know I'm not alone, and I really am grateful for everything we have now… and I'm not the only one that worries about you either! Everyone's been great, and they miss you too. Whatever you probably think, they would be so happy to see you. But…” she looks down, fiddling with one of the bells dangling from her avatar. “It’s…not the same.”
The Pomni stiffens suddenly, then points a digit at the center of the abstraction's mass. “I'm being really honest with you right now, since you were so honest with me last time we… talked. So you don't get to laugh again me, alright?”
The abstraction blinks several of its eyes at her, cocking its head appendage to one side to better examine the squiggly little curlicues of embarrassment wafting off of her. Her appendages drop into her lap and her digits curl loosely on themselves. The abstraction fights back an urge to reach for them. There is no part of it gentle enough to hold them.
“It's just… I know it's not the same, because I know that I… miss you more. Maybe… a lot more. And I think everyone would be really worried if they knew how often I visit you at night. They… really wouldn't understand…"
The Pomni's light redshifts as a wave of pain pulls her into herself. The abstraction does not understand either, not really. But it shuffles carefully closer, because sometimes when it does that the Pomni’s light brightens.
This time is the same. The Pomni stills at its inching approach, eyes wide and searching again. She rearranges her lower appendages until she is kneeling as her upper appendages rise, extending towards the abstraction. She hesitates, eyes falling closed, before pressing them gently against the smoothest area of the abstraction's shadowy mass. The touch sizzles, but the abstraction leans carefully into it anyway.
“I wish I knew how to reach you in there,” she whispers. “I did it once, right? So why can't I figure out how to do it again?”
Equally carefully, the Pomni shifts, moving slowly closer, giving it time to retreat if the sensation becomes too much. Like she understands. Like it burns her too, but she welcomes it just the same. When the abstraction remains still and calm, that’s all the encouragement she needs to carefully press the sleight weight of her small shape against its pulsing blackness, appendages stretching against it as though she would embrace all of it if she could. Heat suffuses its emptiness as her light swells infinitesimally brighter. The abstraction revels in the sharp tingling ache.
When her contact is not rejected, she relaxes against it with a contented sigh and is still, silent, like maybe she is taking comfort, despite the pain they share between them. The abstraction does not understand, and does not care to. It is content with the stillness and silence, and the way her shine has evened out into a peaceful steady glow.
Time has no concrete meaning for the abstraction, but it is aware that time has passed when the Pomni speaks again.
“It's getting late,” she murmurs. The edges of her voice are soft. “I should go to bed.” Her mouth parts stretch open briefly, and she squirms, pulling her appendages back in against her middle, then settles more solidly into a crook of abstraction's mass. “Hmm, in a minute. Definitely in a minute… really gotta go… to…”
The sound trails away as the Pomni’s light begins to change. Not the way it shifts with pain or happiness. This is new. Her consciousness softens slowly until it is practically liquid, swirling and beading like oil in water and sinking through the matrix of her thoughts, until all at once they invert, and a new, different array of constructs emerges.
The abstraction doesn't understand the difference between waking and sleeping. It drifts unmoored through both without any boundaries. It doesn't understand what it means to dream.
But as it watches the blossoming constructs arising from the Pomni’s subconscious, it does understand some things.
The Pomni wants to enter the abstraction again. She can't. But there is a construct forming inside the Pomni's dream, an empty shape that matches its myriad of floating shards if they were all pieced back together.
Maybe it is a vestige of curiosity, maybe just a whim. Maybe it is an echo of something that was once compassion, or longing. Maybe it is nothing but osmosis, simple physics bonding two elements according to natural laws. Maybe it just happens.
The abstraction reaches down and touches the construct inside the Pomni’s dream. All of its shards shiver and twist. It hurts. But there is also a familiar rightness to the pain. It has been here before. It knows where all of its pieces go. Carefully, so very carefully, it pushes in.