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Everything is fine. Completely fine.
Oh, who is she kidding, everything is s[%$!#]t.
It felt like moments ago, when Pomni gave Ragatha a weak smile, promising to talk to her in a moment, she just needed to do something .
Ragatha seemed confused at that, her own small smile downturning as they separated, eyes tracking Pomni’s retreating figure with a slump to their ragdoll avatar, reluctantly closing the door to her room to wait, to give her space.
But Pomni couldn’t pause to look back. She had to speak to Jax. Again. And again and again and again. Whatever it took for him to break his cruel mockery of a comedy mask.
Only, her gloved hand faltered at the door, poised to knock.
“...I'd move on. And probably forget about you.”
Her resolve twinged with the reminder of her first nightmare. Sure, she’s had many since then, but that one stuck with her, like a digital knife stabbed in her back, never quite killing her but always panging with pain and panic at even its possibility.
Her arm shattering into inky blank jagged shards and glowing eyes. Her last view being that of the Cellar’s circular opening, rapidly shrinking as she plummeted and rendering the figures above as nothing but shadows.
“I don’t even remember her name, honestly. ”
Sure, Jax’s tone in the nightmare was flippant, dismissive, and entirely uncaring, while Jax’s true words to her sounded detached, floaty, and truly unnatural through his mask. It didn’t stop the words from taking that knife and twisting it. It didn’t stop him from smiling through the words.
Her breath caught in her throat, and her hand fell limp to her side.
Maybe not tonight.
Letting out a shuddering sigh, Pomni crossed the hall to her room, sliding her back down against the inside of her door and pulling her knees to her chest. She was a coward. She was a coward when she abandoned Ragatha, she was a coward in that Mildenhall Manor, and she was a coward here, right now, refusing to confront Jax again. Hours ago, she was even taunting Zooble for being one.
She just wants to go home.
She shook her head, hard, to dispel that thought. It always lingered, homesickness pressing at her very soul every time her eyes burned and heart hammered with fear or guilt or panic or adrenaline or embarrassment; it’s a stupid hope, after all, when nobody can escape from this place.
Inhale, exhale, repeat, slow.
She exhaled, slow, her long breath whistling like a distant blizzard. It helped to think about the good things, in this place, to ground her. Jax—no matter how much of an a[%$!#]s he is—was right about one thing; you can do anything in here.
Besides escape.
No, but she can win. She can have fun and laugh and ricochet a bullet off of a million one-floor-tall children building blocks to hit a moving target five times because she willed it to happen. Sure, Caine’s oblivious, 5.7 times out of 6, but he tries. He tries to keep up with programming likely decades old, at this point, running on surface-level desires to “make fun adventures.” And sometimes, they were nice.
A smile, small, but there, began to spread on her face, body relaxing as she exhaled slowly once more.
This time, though, the whistling didn’t go away when her hypothetical lungs ran out of breath.
At least, that’s what it seemed like. There was a noise, somewhere, a deep hum that would only be audible in complete silence.
Her smile fell, eyes losing that burning sensation as the scribbles bloomed back into pinwheels, widening with curiosity as she took in the state of her room.
Now that she looked ahead of herself, her room did seem brighter, and not from the small chandelier overhead that gave off a subtle moonlight glow to indicate the Circus’ night cycle, but behind her, the gentle golden glow of the doorway contrasting on the ground with her too-familiar-but-not silhouette.
Wait, behind her?!
She all but lunged away from the door, pinwheels shrinking at the light only glowing brighter. Yellow flecks of what looked to be shimmering fireflies swam through the air, reminding Pomni of the way they circled around Caine’s exit door on her first day.
The Exit Door…
“Hello?” She called out, grabbing at a stack of alphabet blocks to pull herself to her feet. “Caine…? Is this another adventure?”
The humming continued pulsing through the silence, Pomni beginning to fidget with the cuff of her glove, staring in awe and slight fear.
Is this what she sees before she dies? Abstracts? Was all of this for nothing?
“Jax?” Her questioning call died as she spoke, because of course the physical comedy-smashing truck-window-thrower gunslinging troublemaker couldn’t have done something like this. It looked…ethereal in a way that nothing ever has in this world, besides maybe the Void, and that was a chilling sensation she never wanted to experience again.
“What’s going on?” Again, no response. “Is anyone else out there?”
As if in response, the doorway of light flared brighter than the real sun, forcing her to recoil, shielding her eyes from her second flashbang of the day with a wince.
And then, the light retreated as fast as it appeared, the shadows shrinking in an instant and her pinwheels dilating back to normal as they turned back to the door, breath hitching once again. “What?” She muttered, breathless.
In front of her, where the sheen of her brown wooden door would have greeted her, was instead the Exit Door. It was less vibrant than she remembered, scratch marks along its steel edges and spots of faded paint near the handle in the shape of handprints. Handprints. Five fingers.
It looked real . It looked like it was grounded in reality, grounded in her room, and not made up of the polygons that start to hurt her eyes if she stared at them for too long.
“It’s… real.”
And, haltingly, her hand reached for the handle.
— — — —
Jax needed a moment, sure, but in his experience, a moment is all it takes.
He heard the footsteps approaching, too slowly to be Ragatha, not lightly enough to be Gangle but too quiet to be Zooble or a wandering Kinger.
He heard the footsteps go quiet, the silence stretching from the prolonged hesitation interrupted only by a sigh.
He heard the steps quicken as they receded to cross the hall—only a few steps away.
He heard the door close with more force than her shorter form would naturally use.
Whatever, is what he wanted to think. She’s fine, is what he wanted to believe.
That didn’t stop him from sighing and tucking his unease behind a growing smirk, the tense feeling behind his pinprick square pupils releasing as they dilated, and crossing his room to reenter the hall.
With one cursory glance to ensure all doors were closed, Jax strode across the hall, not even needing to raise his hand to knock before a muffled voice called out, “Jax…?”
He stilled, smile faltering at the edges and ears twitching. That tone.
~ THEN ~
“Jax? How did you—what is happening?”
~~~~~~
Accusatory, maybe a hint of a nervous or tired laugh, to start, and that was the familiar part, both times. Immediately, Jax’s pupils shrank to pixels.
He cursed under his breath, patting at his overalls in a frenzy to find the right key. He knew what would be coming next.
The backtracking, the internal correction, the confusion treading only on a tightrope above terror.
“What’s going on?”
~~~~~~
“Can you hear me?!”
~~~~~~
“Is anyone out there?”
He should walk away. He doesn’t need to see this. She’s already too far gone, sounding like that. Like she’s watching her body crumble and can only wish for somebody to tell ~[him]~ her that it’s not real.
So why does he shout for them?
“I’m coming in! Wait a second!”
~~~~~~
“The door’s locked, I can’t get in! Hello?”
~~~~~~
He pulls out the key and jabs it at the lock right when he hears a wince on the other side, a thud of something falling.
“Pomni?” Not too loud, just enough to get her to hear him.
Can she even hear him anymore? Does the Abstraction take that away first?
Doesn’t matter. He pressed against the lock, twisting the golden key to open it, only for the force to cause his upper arm to jolt in place, the key unmoving.
It’s worked, before! Why wouldn’t it now?
“Pomni?” Screw it, he doesn’t care about staying quiet anymore. This is too familiar, deja vu practically ripping his ears off. “Can you hear me?”
~~~~~~
“Holy s[%$!#]t, it’s real. Jax! Jax! You need to come see this! We can get out! I told you we could!”
~~~~~~
“It’s… real.”
Jax recoiled from the faulty lock like he’d been burnt. The airy relief and awe piled up in her voice was sickening. He already knew it was too late, why didn’t he listen to himself?
Where manic excitement shot through the walls THEN, this was almost worse.
She accepted that nobody was there with her to witness her death. Or maybe you start hallucinating at that point, who knows? Maybe she’s watching all the life that she remembers, maybe she’s dreaming as if in a paradise.
He had to remind himself to take a breath for the millionth time today, hand in between his eyes and focusing on pulling himself together so much that he mistook the clang of metal for the timely creak of the wooden door behind him, snapping a panicked glare towards the sugar-sweet, innocent questioning of, “Jax?”
Ragatha's eye swept over Jax’s pinprick pupils with concern, trailing up to Pomni’s door and inserted key only for it to morph into horrified disbelief.
Just as it clicked open.
And all hell broke loose.
Meanwhile, the first thing Pomni heard was a spike on a heart rate monitor, and a soft maternal voice asking, slowly, “Pomni?”