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It’s getting crowded in here.
Well. By Jax’s standards, anyway. To anyone else, it would seem impossible for a place like this to get crowded. The circus is infinitely large and somehow manages to feel uncannily empty despite the constant overload of colors and sound.
But it’s crowded.
It’s been a few months since Pomni arrived, if he’s been counting correctly. She’s become noticeably calmer. She still shakes like a chihuahua half the time, which is hilarious, but at least she doesn’t do a double take at the sight of her own reflection anymore. One could even call her happy.
And for those last few months, everything was fine. As ‘fine’ as the circus could hope to be. Just him and his five cellmates. Five is an okay number. Jax can handle five lunatics any day. Five prank victims, five punching bags, five fellow prisoners.
But in his humble opinion, six is a bit much.
It’s been exactly seven days since the new one arrived. Jax can confidently say that they're the most insufferable person to ever disgrace this hellhole.
He can still remember their arrival pretty clearly. They spawned on the stage, just like all of them do, holding their arms out as if trying to regain their balance. After they regained their bearings, they looked down at themself, giving their suit an exploratory touch with wooden fingers. Then their eyes turned upward, toward the rest of them. Their eyes landed on Jax. By some unknown criteria, they decided that he was the one to approach, because they suddenly started walking toward him.
Then they held out a hand, smiled, and said, with a completely straight face:
“Hello. Are you a hallucination?”
Jax, after taking a moment to register what the hell was going on, smacked their hand away.
And that wasn’t even the weirdest part. By the time everyone had convinced the newcomer that they were not, in fact, hallucinating, their eyes widened. But not with fear, no, with fascination.
Within minutes, they were bouncing on the balls of their feet and asking a million different questions, not a single one of them falling in the realm of what-the-f#&%-am-I-doing-here-get-me-out.
By the end of that day, they had looked down at themself, at their stuffy little suit embroidered with stuffy little gold stars, and chosen the name ‘Atlas.’
So, yeah. Jax is not pleased.
He’s been watching them for a while now. They’re all sitting around the table, eating crude polygons that could pass for food if you squint, and Atlas is smiling and laughing and yapping so much that Jax wouldn’t be surprised if their wooden jaw broke from its hinges.
Jax can’t honestly say it’s the boundless energy that p#$$es him off. It’s the fact that literally everyone is buying it. They’re all nodding along, looking at the dumb pile of plywood like they’re the world’s greatest wordsmith.
It’s gotta be an act; he just knows it. But the real kicker is that he can’t get a read on it. In the week that he’s been observing them, Atlas hasn’t displayed so much as a hairline crack in their composure. No liar’s game is this solid, but they’re giving even Jax a run for his money. It’s frustrating, it’s exhausting, and it’s honestly making him a little jealous, because he could go places with a skill like that.
Maybe the number six isn’t the issue here. Perhaps six would be alright if that sixth person was anyone else.
At the end of the day, Jax supposes, it’s not the number of people that make the circus feel cramped. It’s just the space that each person fills. And Atlas fills so much space that it expands through the circus tent, grating on his own little bubble and leaving him suffocated.
So as he glares daggers at the newbie from across the table, the thought rings true.
It really is getting crowded in here.