Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Caine let out a scream of effort. “Everybody hurry, I can’t hold it open for long!”

-

“Oh god, oh god, oh god, we have to go!” Gangle yelled, grabbing Zooble by the hand and pulling them through. 

- 

The portal crackled, spewing green energy towards them both. 

-      

“Guys, what are you doing??” Ragatha called as she was pulled through.

- 

She felt Jax’s hand grasp hers. “Pomni…

                                                                                                                    thank you for everything.”

                                         and 

everything 

                                                                                          w e n t 

                                                                                                                                                                                       W   H   I   T   E

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*gasp*

That cursed headset clattered to the ground and her breathing took up the only space in the room. She felt herself hit her chair with a wobble before falling to the floor with a yelp. 

The beat up computer in front of her powered down with a whining sound.

She took in the surrounding space, her eyes adjusting to a lack of pigment. The vibrancy that had been burning her eyes for weeks now was gone, and the abandoned office was not only silent, but dark. She reached into her pocket and grasped for her phone. 

1:49 AM.

The computer glitched, sparked, and let out a puff of smoke. 

“Nope, not dealing with that.”

She lifted off the floor and went to the nearest window, gazing up at a sky made starless by light pollution, and seeing–for the first time since before the circus– a gibbous moon. 

Christine backed out of the room, feeling sluggish as if within a dream.

It was time to go home.

Chapter Text

Christine’s phone was at 14%, but she’d still been able to call a taxi to take herself home. She had her wallet on her as well, and how had she managed to retain everything that had been on her before she was sucked into the game? Where had her body been, if it wasn’t in that room, considering that she’d been given a new one?

… was she entirely sure the whole circus hadn’t been a gas-leak induced hallucination?

The taxi pulled up to the sidewalk in front of her apartment building, the sky dark in that way it only gets after midnight. 

Christine stepped out onto the sidewalk, once again disoriented by the rigidity of her limbs. 

She was lucky that she hadn’t dropped her keys. 

The security guard in the lobby was half asleep when she stepped inside, and the whirring of the elevator as it took her to the eighth floor was strangely soothing. 

She remembered that dumbwaiter she’d been crammed into with Kinger, back in that horrible haunted house that not even Zooble had liked the sound of—seriously, Caine, who was that for??!!— and hoped that his sanity had been somewhat restored by his escape, not further deteriorated. 

The ding! of the elevator roused her from her thoughts and she padded down the hallway to her room. 

Christine traced the tarnished numbers on the door and slid her key into the familiar lock, shaking it in a practiced manner that she hadn’t even remembered was necessary until now—the damn thing always stuck—some of her memories still blurred and zipped into pockets in her mind. 

She still couldn’t even sense whatever vacancies may have remained. 

The jangling of the chains and the unlocking of the door subsided into the quiet of the early morning as Christine stepped into her apartment, holding her breath. 

The buzz of the fridge was grounding as she passed it, the light at the bottom of the tv so familiar that she could almost believe that she had woken up from a nightmare and went to get some tea, even though she would have entered from the other direction. 

As she made her way through the living room and towards her own, there was a creaking sound ahead of her, and a piercing cry rang through the air. 

Startled, and completely intolerant of jumpscares, Christine responded with her own scream and flinched out of the way of a brandished lamp—wielded by none other than her roommate. 

“Lizzie!” She shrieked. “Holy fuck!”

“Christine!”

“…scared the shit out of me..”

“…did you even come from? You’ve been…”

“…I can swear now!”

“…dead in an alley somewhere!!”

The two girls looked at each other, perplexed.

“…what?”

“What?!”

Lizzie placed a hand over her heart, breathing heavily. 

“You”—she held up a finger to illustrate just wait a second— “have been missing for three weeks? I thought you were dead!”

Christine froze, her mind racing. 

Lizzie continued, “…did you just say I can swear now ? As if you couldn’t before?”

Christine looked up, panicked. “Ummm…nooo?”

Lizzie narrowed her eyes, then sighed, conceding. “Shit, Chrissy, where have you been? I was calling you and texting you and no one at your job had seen you, and I was about a week away from having to start looking for a new roommate.”

Christine exhaled, struck with the implications of having vanished off the face of the planet for nearly a month.

…did she even still have a job?

Placing her own hands over her roommate’s, Christine looked Lizzie in the eyes, attempting to comfort her. “Liz, I promise I am fine–I can’t really explain where I was but I’m not going back there, okay? I won’t vanish like that again.”

Her roommate nodded.

Christine smiled. “Good. Okay, I’m going to go pass out—I have had an unbelievably long few weeks—and I will figure out if I’ve been fired in the morning. Can we- talk later? I’m, uh…”

She trailed off as she tried to find a way to explain the feeling of waking up from being a character in a video game. She imagined it must feel similar to returning from space and reentering gravity. Or waking up from a coma. 

“...I’m tired.”

Lizzie nodded, and Christine slipped away to her room before her roommate could question her further. 

It was dark inside her room, and she sank into the familiar warmth of her bed after kicking off her shoes, barely remembering to plug her dying phone in to charge. 

She flung off her jeans and rolled under her covers, unwilling to be bothered by trying to find pyjamas. 

Christine could feel sleep tugging at the edges of her vision, and she let her mind wander to thoughts of the others while she waited for it to take her—would those of them that had been in the Circus for years have nowhere left waiting for them upon awakening?

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Christine reentered her apartment exhausted, promptly collapsing against the door and sinking down to sit on the floor, holding her knees.

At least she hadn’t been fired.

The company she worked for hadn’t been thrilled about her vanishing from work, but when her roommate managed to call in and let them know that she was basically a missing person, they had given her the benefit of the doubt that she hadn’t been skipping work on purpose.

When she returned, she had to sit through a bunch of meetings with her supervisor and the human resources department; but after bursting into very convincing tears (that she’d managed to pull from her very real exhaustion, frustration and grief from her recent experiences), she’d been granted her job back under suspension of certain privileges. 

She’d better not miss any more work anytime soon. 

Christine pulled out her phone, and for the first time realised how hopeless contacting other members of the circus truly was. She had no idea where they’d been spat out, no idea where they were from or how long they had been gone–it wasn’t like she had Jax’s fucking number. 

The only way she could possibly think to get ahold of them was to post something about the circus online and hope that they’d see it, and even that was only plausible for certain members.

Even so, it was the best that she’d got. 

Christine swiped her passcode into her phone, then took a deep breath and opened Tumblr.

Chapter Text

Arthur was very lucky the mortgage on their house was already paid off when he and Gwennie got trapped in the circus.

It had been sitting here undisturbed for years, somehow miraculously still in his name, at the end of a heavily wooded road just outside of town, where no one had even noticed it was empty. 

Of course, it was covered in dust and the only reason it still had water and power was because they weren’t on a grid but rather had their own well and solar panels, but at the very least, when he finally woke up, Arthur had somewhere to go. 

It didn’t take him long, after being spat out into his home office, to immediately log back on to his computer.

Should he have been more cautious? Perhaps. Getting trapped in a perpetual existential crisis of a video game for years wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a good time, after all. But computers were what he was good at, and he wasn’t going to get anywhere going out into the street and asking people for help in person.

He was just sane enough to know that they’d think he was crazy.

Instead, Arthur decided to venture into the vast wastes of the internet, and try to find any mention of The Amazing Digital Circus.

Obviously he couldn’t comb through the entire internet himself, but it had been so long since he’d been able to play around with code, and longer still since he’d been able to create a proper algorithm.

It was maybe a day or two before he happened on a… Tumblr post from brand new user… EscapedCourtJester? 

What was Tumblr and why had he never heard of it? 

Well, whatever the case, someone on this… befuddling app website had posted about the circus, unmistakably. 

They had said:

-

“Has anyone heard of the Amazing Digital Circus?

A little while ago I watched this pilot for a show called The Amazing Digital Circus, where a bunch of people lost their memories and got trapped in a digital world. I’ve recently remembered it exists, but for the life of me I’ve scoured the internet and I cannot find it anywhere. Is this just some huge Mandela effect? If anyone remembers anything about it, please contact me.” 

🎪👄🐰🎭👑🫧🪡🃏🧩

-

Arthur had reached out. 

This post had too much information to not be made by someone who had been at the circus - the emojis were too specific. But narrowing down that Ragatha had probably never heard of this website, knowing Jax probably wouldn’t reach out, and given the name of the account, there were really very few people it could be. 

In fact, there was only one. 

Arthur navigated to the account’s direct messaging, and typed, “ Pomni?”

Chapter Text

It took Christine the entire day between when she’d first gotten the message and when they were supposed to meet, including the drive to the bar and actually walking up to the bartender before she realized she didn’t know Kinger’s real name or anything about his physical appearance. 

She’d walked up to the bartender, started to ask if he was here, before stalling upon the realization that she didn’t know his name and kind of just standing there, frozen.

The tattooed blonde woman waved an amused hand in front of her face. 

“Help you with something, miss?”

Christine snapped out of it with an almost comical shake of her head, making, perhaps slightly offputting eye contact, and blurting out, “Yes! I mean, no? I mean…” 

She didn’t do well with social interaction on the best of days, and this was… hardly that.

Christine continued, “I’m meeting an online friend, but I’ve realized I don’t know his name or what he looks like? And he doesn’t know about me either, so…” She sighed, fully aware that this was already a disaster. “if someone comes in that doesn’t know who they’re meeting, can you point them to that table in the corner?”

She nodded towards the table she was planning on sitting at, and the bartender nodded and slid her drink order over to her wordlessly. 

Christine mumbled, “thanks,” and slouched over to that table, sitting with her back against two walls in a dark corner and sipping on a drink she hadn’t meant to get. 

It was maybe half an hour before a frazzled man in a checkered cardigan and glasses walked in, marched up to the bar and visibly faltered, exchanging a short conversation with the bartender, who pointed him towards Christine’s table. He scampered over to her, pulling out a chair and clumsily managing to sit in it, facing her. She held her breath. 

The man spoke, “Pomni?” The voice out of his mouth was achingly familiar. 

“Kinger!” Christine leaped out of her chair and threw her arms around him, halting once the hug was underway and she felt him freeze underneath her, before he shouted, “Pomi!” and embraced her back. After a few seconds the hug became too much, and she extracted herself, sitting back down and pulling her shoulders in tighter. Kinger beamed at her.

“Actually,” she mumbled, “It’s Christine.”

“...What?”

“My name. It’s Christine.”

The man in front of her let out a comical, “Oh!” and seemed to stall in front of her before lowering his voice and smiling kindly, saying, “It’s very nice to meet you, Christine.”

She reached for his outstretched hand and took it gingerly, shaking hands with him as they were finally properly introduced. She pulled her arm back.

“So, what about you?”

He cocked his head at her. “What?”

“Your name. I can’t keep just-” she let out a nervous chuckle “-keep calling you Kinger, can I?”

He seemed unphased. “Sure you can. Why not?”

She sighed. “Because it’s not your name! What- what’s your name?”

He furrowed his brow, reaching into his pocket for a wallet and pulling out a driver’s license. 

“Aha!” He held the card out toward her so she could see the name on it. It was very expired. “It’s Arthur.”

Christine smiled, somehow feeling more settled just by proximity to Kinger. 

“Well,” she said, softly, “It’s very nice to meet you, Arthur.”

Chapter Text

Genuinely, Christine just couldn’t be fucking bothered.

Like yeah, you’re supposed to eat home cooked meals because they’re healthier, and also they’re cheaper, and she was still on thin ice at work for vanishing for a month, but… 

Well, she just really wanted a goddamn cheeseburger. 

It had actually been a while since she stepped foot inside a fast food place, the last time (if that counted) being that one adventure where Caine put Gangle in charge and Christine didn’t really know what happened after she clocked out. 

She wasn’t exactly sure she wanted to, either.

Nonetheless, the burger place felt the same as any other she’d ever been in–the homogeny of fast food chains weirdly comforting as much as it often felt liminal–and she slunk off to a corner table after ordering a giant vanilla milkshake alongside her burger, rather than fries.

Christine fiddled with a packet of salt as she waited, thinking back to a conversation she’d had just days before they’d escaped.

——

“What would it be, for you?”

Pomni stared at the floor, arms wrapped around her knees as she spoke. 

“What do you mean?” said Jax, uncharacteristically subdued. 

“Abstraction,” said Pomni, still refusing to look at him. “What do you think would break you?”

She saw him freeze out of the corner of her eye, that preternatural stillness like a real rabbit in the face of a predator. 

“I don’t know,” he said, quieter than she’d ever heard him. 

There was a pause, and then, “if this place hasn’t broken me by now, maybe it never will.”

Pomni hummed, noncommittal. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

Jax tilted his head, smirk sliding back onto his face, more bitter than usual. 

“Nothing scares me anymore.”

Pomni gripped her own hands more tightly. “But-”

“HELLOOO, MY NIHILISTIC CRYSANTHEMUMS, AND WELCOME TO ANOTHER DAY IN THE AMAAAAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS!!”

“Aughhhh goddamit Caine!”

“Ahh, Caine, what the %$ !#?!?”

—-

Christine rolled her eyes as she recalled the interruption. 

“Stupid, fucking dentist’s mascot of a ringleader and his goddamn perverted bubble virus…” she muttered. 

“..what?”

“Ahhh!”

As intolerant of jumpscares as she had been in her memory, Christine flinched and fell off her chair, limbs flailing. 

“Holy shit, dude, what was that?” Said the scrawny employee placing Christine’s food on her table.

Christine picked herself off the floor and eyed him, embarrassed. 

“Sorry, I just… your voice sounded really familiar and I thought you were someone else.”

The employee furrowed his brow. “Yeah, that… that makes two of us, actually.”

Christine snapped her gaze up to meet his. He stared back at her. 

“What was that…” he started, then paused, weighing it over. “What was that you were saying about a mouth…? ringmaster?” 

Her eyes blew wide. “Jax?!??” She hissed. 

“Pomni?!!”

“Holy shit, Jax!”

“Oh my god!”

“Kinger wrote an entire algorithm and I found you by accident???” She screeched. 

“Holy fuck, what the hell?” He dropped into the seat next to her, arms up on the table and leaning right over to her. 

“Oh my fucking god!” She said, leaning back in her seat as she caught her breath. “What the fuck?”

“Yeah,” Jax responded, “what the fuck? Wait,”

He asked, sobering. “You were looking for me?”

Christine narrowed her eyes. “Yes?” She responded, confused, “I’m looking for everyone.”

Jax leaned back in his chair as well, fiddling with the hat he’d been wearing. “Yeah, and you’ve already found Kinger.” 

Christine nodded. “Well, Arthur, actually. But, I mean, he kinda found me.” 

Jax nodded. “And obviously, you’re looking for Ragatha. And, like, Gangle or whatever and I guess Zooble’ll probably show up at some point, just out of spite, but, I mean… why are you looking for me?”

“…what?”

“No, like,” he smirked. “Everyone hates me. Like, I mean, fuck all of you guys, really. I wasn’t looking for you.”

“Jax, we don’t actually hate you-”

“Pfft, Pomni, say that around the others some time and see where it gets you, Christ!” Jax exclaimed, laughing. It was the same ‘entertained’ voice he used back at the circus when he was trying to make fun of what people said. 

“It’s Christine, actually,” she said slowly.

“Hmm?”

“My name. Christine.”

“Oh.”

“…if you wouldn’t mind”

He smirked. “Yeah, sure.”

Christine looked at Jax, who was still holding his stupid hat. He was just as tall as he was in the circus, but she wasn’t as short, so they were on slightly more equal footing. Without the ears he also towered above less. 

He had kind of scraggly sandy hair, and those weird muted blue eyes that looked kind of brown in some lighting. He wasn’t looking at her. 

“I don’t hate you, Jax,” she said, quietly. 

He didn’t move. 

“I just got frustrated.” 

“Yeah.” He scoffed. “Why is this asshole not going away? Probably better if he’d just curl up and die or something, go be judgemental in his own little corner and leave everybody else alone.”

Christine tried to duck her head to catch his eyes from where he was looking at the table. He looked away. “I wasn’t frustrated that you weren’t leaving us alone,” she said. 

He rolled his head away from her like he was rolling his eyes. 

“No, really, I—” she sighed. “I was more frustrated that you were. It was like you were… existing in the periphery, hovering around the edges and cutting in with whatever scathing remark, and… especially after the shootout, I just wanted to scream at you, you know?”

She felt him lift his head and resolutely decided not to look in his direction, staring straight ahead and letting him watch her. 

“Like, for fuck’s sake, just participate in something. Hang out with us! Make a fucking friend instead of pushing everyone away!”

She flung her hands into the air and then placed them back down again. 

“But, I mean, I get it,” she said, softer. “That place brought out the neurotic in all of us.” 

“Michael! Hey!”

Both heads turned to the short, violently ginger thirty-something man shouting at Jax, face bright red with anger. 

“Get back to work and stop harassing the customers!”

Jax rolled his eyes and shouted back, “I’m on my fucking lunch break!”

The man stormed over, gesturing sharply in Jax’s direction and turning his gaze onto Christine. “He’s bothering you, right?”

She tilted her head. “No?…”

Jax smirked. “See? Christine and I are old friends.” He exaggeratedly placed an arm around her shoulders. She grimaced awkwardly, uncomfortable with the social interaction, before realizing something. 

The man stormed off in a huff, and Jax watched him go, snickering. He turned to Christine, expecting her to also laugh, but was met with a softer expression. 

He scoffed again, drawing back his shoulders. “What?”

She smiled. “You called me your friend.”

“Well, I… no! I mean, pshhh, right? Can you believe he bought that? Fucking sucker.”

Jax looked away, blushing faintly. Christine let the smallest smile show on her face while he couldn’t see. 

“...so,” she said, after a minute, “Michael, huh?”

He laughed nervously . “Oh! Yeah! Michael! Yes, that is my actual, human name! Uh huh!”

Christine narrowed her eyes. “Jax…”

He dropped his head onto the table. “Ugh! Fine.”

She waited a moment. 

“…it’s my middle name.”

“Your middle name?”

“Yeah.”

“Jax.”

When he spoke, his voice was muffled. “Yes?”

“What’s your first name?”

Christine poked him in the back of the head to get his attention. He jerked it away, still sulking. 

She raised her eyebrows. 

She waited for a second. 

“…it’s Jackson.”

Christine blinked. “It’s— what?”

Jax lifted his head, groaning. “It’s Jackson, okay? That’s my name. Jeez.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “That can’t be all there is to it.”

He mumbled something. 

“What was that?”

“With an x!” He repeated, almost yelling. 

“What?!”

“Jaxson, with an x, okay?” 

She stared at him. He looked at her, and then looked down. 

“..people just mostly call me Jax.”

She clapped a hand over her mouth. She could feel it, like a rising tide, beginning to bubble over. 

He looked at her, eyes wide. “Pomni-”

Laughter began to spill out from behind her hand. 

“Christine, please!” He hissed. 

She erupted into giggles collapsing onto the table, eyes streaming. 

“You had your actual name??!”

Jax groaned. “I didn’t know it was my name at the time, okay!”

“Holy shit, Jax, oh my god!” She flung herself back up to look at him. 

“I—” he rolled his eyes. “Okay, fine, get it all out now.”

“I can’t believe,” she said between fits of laughter, “that people were going by Ragatha, and, like, Zooble, and Caine just let you have your real name!”

“Pomni, please, it’s not that strange a name!”

She waved her hands around. “No wonder everyone thinks you’re an asshole!”

His eyes were wide. “They think I’m an asshole because I was one, what— please just stop laughing, my manager’s going to kill me!”

The reminder that everyone else in the joint must think that they’re crazy was incredibly funny to Christine. If only they knew, she thought. She dropped her head onto the table and a fresh round of giggles began anew.