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Caine teleports them back to the circus grounds without any epilogue or minced words, reading the room for once in a blue moon and understanding that everyone was deeply, deeply upset with him. He and Bubble make themselves scarce, but it doesn’t matter. Jax’s ire hasn’t dimmed. Not in the slightest.
His hands tremble. His ears are bent, just like his insufferable clone’s. His teeth are gritted, his vision is blurry, and he’s so angry he can’t think. Can’t help but direct his barbarous words at the others without Caine here as a punching bag.
“Great job on the assist, team,” he hisses into the silence, sarcasm dripping cruelly off his words. The others finally look over, miserable expressions shifting into pure appall. Ragatha seems shocked by his audacity.
The shock doesn’t last long. Her features contort with unbridled anger, and Jax is relieved to see something so familiar. Complete and utter hopelessness doesn’t look so great on Ragatha.
“Assist?” She snarls, breaking away from her spot next to Kinger to stalk up to Jax. “What, you wanted all of us to blindly run up and press buttons with you? When were you going to tell us you didn’t actually want to leave?”
“Okay, guys, let’s just calm down,” Pomni says quickly, ever the mediator. She steps between them, pale hand raised placatingly in Ragatha’s direction. Jax ignores her completely, his fur bristling as he stares the doll down. His body itches for a fight, and he will not allow Pomni to talk either of them away from the ledge. Not after today. Not after everything they’ve just lost.
“It wasn’t real! None of it was ever—” He breaks off, something ugly in his chest twisting unpleasantly. He automatically squashes it down, changing the subject on a dime and neatly sidestepping Ragatha’s second question. “Caine is causing abstractions, and he’s been messing with our {#@$%}ing minds, and—and you just—”
Queenie. Dinobert. Kaufmo. Ribbit.
All gone. All trapped in a pit under the circus for eternity. All because of their fucked up ringmaster. His hands curl into balled fists. He wants to scream. Punch a wall. Drown himself in the digital lake.
“I just can’t believe you’re this nonchalant, Rags,” Jax jeers instead, his words barbed and accusatory. This rhythm—picking fights with his castmates—feels achingly redundant. He’s treaded this exact path more times than he can remember. He could do it on autopilot. He could probably do it in his sleep.
“How dare you?” Ragatha’s retort is colder than ice. “All because I couldn’t see through Abel’s ruse, all because I still had hope—”
“Guys,” Zooble pipes up next, eyes glinting with a myriad of emotions. They’d been staring over at Gangle, concerned as she muffles quiet sobs into her ribbons. Their voice is flat and authoritative, but resentment towards their situation still shines through. “Stop arguing. You’re making it worse.”
Jax scoffs. He’s ready to defy them out of pure spite, but then his gaze roves over the group. It’s been a truly, truly horrible day, and all of its twists and turns have everyone slumped, dejected, and barely standing. They look exhausted. Jax feels exhausted.
Zooble is right. He is making it worse.
But instead of backing down or addressing the gaping wound head-on, he twists the knife in just a little deeper. “I can’t do this anymore,” he reveals, unable to hide the weariness dogging his voice deep underneath his veneer of self-righteous anger.
He can’t handle it when everyone’s eyes widen with shock at his admission, when even Gangle raises her mask from her ribbons to stare. So he turns away. And he walks off to his room without another word.
Nobody does anything to stop him. He tells himself he couldn't care less.
Jax hasn’t moved in hours.
He’s sinking into his bed, into his pillow. Every minute here in the dark pulls him just a little closer to abstraction. He can feel the glitchy rot devouring him from the inside out, and can see the psychedelic light show every time he closes his eyes.
He’s getting closer; it wouldn’t be long now. Some buried part of himself is screaming to get up, take a walk, prolong his abstraction date, but oh, what’s the fucking point? Wouldn’t it just be better to leave this wretched place behind, to finally join Kaufmo and Ribbit as an empty husk down in the cellar?
He just…he just needs to let go.
His resolve and determination are all he’s got left. He can't afford to be chicken shit about it now. He’s ready. He’ll face his abstraction head-on.
Funny that mere seconds after he’s made this decision, Pomni breaks into his room.
Well. She didn’t break in, per se, but his door swung open with a betraying creak, and she’s standing in his doorframe with a hand on the knob, pinning him in place with those ridiculous saucer eyes. Gobsmacked, Jax raises into a sitting position to return the look, cartoonish blood running cold at her presence.
She really just interrupted his suicide. He is speechless, truly.
“Jax—“
“What the {$#@%},” he interrupts, tone flatter than a board. Pomni’s face flushes, her pinwheels spinning.
She fidgets as Jax stares. “Sorry, the door wasn’t locked, and—”
Jax snorts. “What are you talking about? It’s always locked!”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t locked just now, so,” Pomni sighs, then seems to dredge up her original conviction. “Look, I didn’t mean to bother you, I just wanted to make sure you were still…” She gestures vaguely at him.
Jax snickers even as his metaphorical heart crawls into his throat. “Still got just the two eyes?” He coos, ears flopping behind his head like a puppy’s. “Aw, Pommers, I didn’t know you cared this much.” That’s a bald-faced lie; he knew exactly how much she cared, and it terrified him quite a bit.
Pomni doesn’t take the bait. “Can you stop?” She grumbles, taking a purposeful step into his room. Jax’s smile freezes as she leaves the safety of his doorframe, slowly beginning to approach his bed. “What do I have to do for you to realize we’re on the same side?”
Great, soooo…deflecting isn’t working! Time for phase two: being an insufferable little cunt. It drove even Ragatha away eventually. Pomni’ll be a piece of pudding.
“I can’t think of anything more insulting than being pitied by you,” Jax chirps with a cheerful grin, trying not to shy away as she continues to close the distance, when she extends a gentle hand towards him.
“It isn’t pity I feel for you,” her retort comes without missing a beat, but it’s quieter. As if she didn’t mean for Jax to hear it. Struck speechless for the first time since he could remember, he’s completely unprepared as her small fingers sink reassuringly into the fur on his shoulder.
“It’s just me,” she adds, as if her presence wasn’t complicating everything. “You don’t have to—“
“Get out of my room, Pomni,” he coldly interrupts, leaning out of her hand and glaring down at the floor to avoid eye contact. Pomni hesitates, but she’s too damn stubborn for her own good. She tries to cup his shoulder, and this time he snaps, recoiling from her as if she’d burnt him.
The worst thing about it? Her gentle touch felt like the best thing since sliced bread, but he’d bury that thought until he abstracted. “What gives, huh? Do you touch everyone like we’re at a petting zoo? Or is it just me?”
She tries to smother it, but Jax can hear the hurt coating her voice. He knew she despised being touched. Yet she continuously abandons her comfort zone. For him. Why? “I—I’m sorry, Jax, I wasn’t thinking—“
His stomach lurches at her pain, irritated that he didn’t get any happiness out of torturing her. Out of everyone here, he hated Pomni the least. And maybe that should be concerning, considering the awful way he spoke to her just a few days prior. He’s constantly reminded of the way she buried her teeth into his skin like she had something to prove.
She’s always felt…
Real.
However.
No matter how much he (ugh) likes Pomni, going easy on her would…set a precedent. It’d invite useless complications. And he can’t afford that.
“Yeah, Poms, I can tell you don’t think very much,” he agrees dryly, even when his own body screams to just give it a break, to accept a gentle touch for once in his life. He rolls over, facing the polaroids fixed to the wall. He glares at Ribbit’s smug smile until he can see their face when he closes his eyes. “Get out.”
He’s expecting pushback, but surprisingly, Pomni holds her tongue. She hesitates before leaving, of course, staring down at him with a small frown. But she inevitably leaves him to his desolate isolation, and the door clicks shut behind her tiny frame. “Finally,” he spits into the silence. “I can die in peace.”
He says it like a joke, but he knows he’s far from joking.
He glares at the wall for a while, silently fuming. That…
Why did he do that?
Okay.
Yeah, he’s…
He’s just going to go to bed.
As Jax begins to doze off, probably for the last time, his long ears pick up on the cartoonishly loud sound of glass shattering outside his room. He muffles his scream into his pillow.
Fuuuck. Was that Caine?
Dying in peace is an utterly foreign concept to his castmates, apparently.
He stands up and miserably stalks to the door, ready to add to the havoc. But as he does, he realizes he heard the glass shatter from the room across the hall. Mouth twisting into a worried frown, he picks up the pace, opening his door and darting across the hall to Pomni’s room.
She hadn’t closed her door.
He pushes it open the rest of the way, and—
Pomni’s tall mirror has shattered, and a billion twinkling shards of glass lie around her—
Her abstracting—
Pomni is abstracting.
For a moment, all Jax can do is stare, utterly dumbfounded. He doesn’t know if what he’s seeing is real until Pomni sobs. He moves, closing the distance to her without a second of hesitation. His ears arch, his pupils tiny and frantic. She hasn’t even registered his presence.
He can’t stop talking. Pleading. Babbling. The words fall from his mouth without permission. “I didn’t mean—I never meant for—Pom, Pomni, I—“ Jax falls to his knees before her like a marionette with cut strings, barely feeling the glass dig into his overalls. His fingers twitch at his sides.
His thoughts move at a dizzying pace, and his vision swims as he struggles to focus. Of course she was abstracting. Their fight, this awful, awful day, and the way he just spoke to her…
He is such a goddamn moron—and the self-loathing bubbles through his veins like tar. “I’m sorry,” he blurts out, meeting her spiraling pupil with tear-filled eyes. The half-abstracted part of Pomni bores holes into him, multicolored sclera reprimanding him for being a complete and utter failure.
Taking delight in the fact that it was about to rip the one person Jax cared about in this circus from him…again.
It’s too much to bear. Tears drip down his cheeks, soaking his fur. “{#£%#}, Pomni, I’m so sorry, I—“
“JJJJJax—?” Her voice is garbled, glitchy and distorted. Everything is all so wrong, but her one eye is finally focused on him. Jax sets his jaw, blinks past the tears, and forces his artificial lungs to fucking work, because he can’t afford to lose his shit if he wants to save her.
He caught it happening before abstraction fully consumed her. Maybe he still has a chance? Pomni’s hand extends toward him once again. “HHHHHelp me, pl-please, Jax—!”
Her eyes are filled with so much fear. So much repressed pain. If Jax had a beating heart, it’d snap clean in half from her expression alone. “I’m here, Pomni,” he promises. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And to prove it, he leans forward and hugs her.
He’s never touched an abstracting person before, so he’s completely unsure of what to expect. Uncontrollable glitching and convulsions? Unimaginable pain?
Instead, hugging an abstracting Pomni felt…familiar. The jagged, pulsating part of her body does nothing to him. He can almost pretend it wasn’t there at all as he curls closer. He’s been on the cusp of abstracting many times before, and if he had to describe it, he’d say it felt similar to floating away on a big, puffy cloud.
But from Pomni’s terrified, pained expression, and the way she trembles against him—she’s clearly experiencing something much, much different. How strange. Was Pomni’s defiance and sheer will battling against the abstraction process?
If he’s right, then…that’s good. Because if she abstracted, he’d be right behind her.
This realization hits him with all the subtlety of a freight train. He squeezes his eyes shut, pressing his face into her temple. Sheer exhaustion and misery translate into more tears against her hair. His voice is whispered. A desperate plea.
He doesn’t want her to abstract.
“Please don’t leave.”
Pomni’s hand comes up to clutch an overall strap. She clings to him, refusing to let even an inch of distance come between them.
Not that Jax would choose to be anywhere else.
He doesn’t know how long he kneels with her in the broken glass, how long it took until he couldn’t hear the sound of abstraction echoing in his ears. However many eons he waited until that frothy darkness disappeared back into the depths from which it came. But when Pomni finally shifts against him, he slowly pulls away.
Not far, because she wobbles precariously without his support. Uncharacteristically gentle, his hands close delicately around her arms. “Jax?” She asks, voice hoarse and barely audible.
“Come on,” he replies, his voice just as fucked. He helps her balance on shaky, baby-giraffe legs. “Let’s just…get out of here.”
Pomni drags her free hand across her hooded eyes and puffy cheeks, exhausted and not all the way present. But she grips him like a lifeline, and he abruptly decides that she’s not to leave his sight until he’s sure all the abstraction’s been leeched from her body.
The halls are quiet. The circus is quiet. They walk the grounds, and the moon doesn’t bother them. There’s not even a single artificial animal noise. Just the rustling of the digital trees as the wind blows through their leaves.
Jax slowly leads Pomni to the lake, and they take a seat in the neatly sheared grass. She lets go of him to wrap her arms around her bony knees, and he tries hard to smother his immediate longing for her touch.
Neither of them speaks for a very, very long time. They let their gazes roam across the water’s undisturbed surface, allowing their thoughts to wander as they process what they’ve just experienced.
“I’d care,” Jax mutters, eventually.
Pomni’s eyes tear from the lake and bounce over to him instantaneously. He swallows the frog in his throat, rubbing the back of his neck and forcing himself to meet her gaze. “I’d care,” he tries again, “if you abstracted, I mean.”
Pomni’s lips crooking up into a smile feels like a shot to the heart. His words hang in the silence between them, and for once, he doesn’t feel obligated to break it with a joke or witty one-liner.
“You have an interesting way of showing it,” Pomni teases, and bursts into weak laughter when Jax drags an exasperated hand down his face.
“You’re funny,” she adds in the comfortable silence that follows, voice a murmur. “Don’t do it again.”
His pupils expand, mouth widening into an unapologetically genuine grin. She is so feisty for someone who nearly lost her mind. His pulse thrums as he stares down at her, his fur standing on end.
He feels alive. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And don’t call me that,” she sighs with a slight shake of the head, but her smile only grows. Her pinkie brushes against his hand in the fake grass, and his eyes immediately drop to their point of contact.
He hesitates.
Ah, fuck it.
He wraps his pinkie around hers.