Work Text:
Jax wasn’t born lucky. For the first sixteen years of his life, he lived in a crammed apartment with dozens of people he’s since forgotten. He knows he lived with his mother, but the other people were just that. Other people.
There was one girl that he remembered, though. A girl he’ll never forget as long as his memory lets him keep her safe and close.
She had a bronze tan and long, flowing green hair that he never saw her dye. Even a decade later, he could swear it was her natural colour. But it was beautiful. She was beautiful.
He had no idea where she came from. One day, there was a knock at the door, and a girl who looked around his age was there with one bag. Jax would try to search for her, her parents, anything, but he’d always leave empty handed.
It was as though she appeared as quickly as she’d leave.
Jax was in absolute awe when she first arrived. He walked right up to her when she came in, eager to help her with her bags.
“Here, let me help you,” he said. She smiled but didn’t say anything.
There was a small area in the back of the second bedroom where he slept. He took her there and set her bag down next to his mattress.
“This is where I sleep,” he told her. This time, she nodded, but again, she said nothing.
Jax shrugged and grabbed a box from under his pillow along with a lighter. “I’m going on a walk. If you want to come with me, you can. Or you can stay here.”
When she hesitated, he added, “I’ll get you food, too.”
That got her to listen, and she immediately followed him back through the crowded house and outside.
Once they were outside, he pulled a cigarette out of his aluminum box and lit it. He made a point to try and keep the smoke away from her, trying to be considerate to this new girl. Maybe his new friend. He had no idea yet.
“I’m Jax,” he finally introduced himself. “Do you even speak?”
She shrugged, smiling. He just laughed and choked on his cigarette.
It would take a few weeks for her to actually speak. They were walking through the streets of Neo Cirque. Jax was talking and smoking, as he always did. She was laughing (and oh how Jax loved her laugh) and bumping into him.
“Ribbit,” she said quietly. Her voice was so quiet that Jax swore he was hearing things at first. “That’s my name.”
Jax laughed. “That’s a good name,” he told her.
It wasn’t, really. If anything, it was a ridiculous name that, in retrospect, she had made up on the spot just so he could call her something other than silly nicknames like Green Apple or Logo Hair or Caterpillar.
She wouldn’t speak again for another few weeks, but at least Jax now had a name to call her when he wanted her to look at something or he wanted to get her attention.
Ribbit was always a quiet girl, but Jax spoke enough for the two of them. He didn’t mind. If anything, he liked it a lot because he loved to talk.
“You should let me dye your hair,” she said. She played with his curly hair, careful not to run her fingers through it. “You’d look so cute.”
“Oh, you think I’m cute?” Jax teased. Ribbit laughed and hit his shoulder. “No, no, I get it! I’m very attractive!”
“But I’m serious!” Ribbit insisted. “I could fix your curl pattern, too. Please?”
And how could Jax tell this girl no?
They acquired the hair dye, shampoo, and conditioner from a store (in a totally and completely legal way). When they ran back to the abandoned place they always hung out, Ribbit had grabbed ahold of his hand, and he didn’t want to ever let her go.
“I don’t have much bleach left,” Ribbit said, “but I think I can make this work.”
She sat him down in front of a broken and dirty mirror, making him sit on the floor because he was too tall for her. Even so, he had to slouch over so she could reach his roots.
“Stop wiggling!” Ribbit giggled. “You’re so difficult.”
“It’s not my fault you’re three feet tall,” Jax teased. Ribbit gasped and glared at him through the mirror while he tried to hide his giggles.
She grinned mischievously then, before Jax could process, she’d gotten bleach on his eyebrows.
“Now everyone’s gonna think I’m blond!” Jax exclaimed. Ribbit couldn’t stop laughing. “You should dye my eyebrows purple. To make this all better.”
It was clear that he just wanted to have purple eyebrows because they look cool.
Still, Ribbit nodded and held out her hand. “Deal.” He awkwardly shook her hand as she laughed again at how ridiculous he looked.
It took hours to get his hair purple. Thankfully, they only had to bleach once with his virgin hair, but it still had to sit for well over an hour and a half. Then, rinsing it took forever because they had to sneak around to a business with a hose attached and try not to get caught.
“It’s fucking cold!” Jax complained far too loudly. Ribbit shushed him.
“Stop being a baby,” she told him. “Or at least be a quieter baby.”
“I’ll be as loud as a baby as I want,” he pouted, but he stayed quiet after that.
Drying took ages, too. They were lucky enough to find a public bathroom with far too loud automatic hand dryers, but it’s very suspicious for two people to be inside a single room bathroom for any amount of time, so they still felt like they’re sneaking around everywhere.
“I feel like we’re breaking the law,” Ribbit practically yelled over the hand dryers. These were probably fifty years old, so it was a shock they were even working at all. They’d take loud dryers over broken ones any day.
“We are,” Jax reminded her. “We st-.”
“Acquired everything very legally,” she cut him off. “Be helpful, now. Fluff up your hair while I try to dry it. No, like you mean it.”
Jax had never been so relieved to be in their grimy hiding spot. His hair was a sort of ugly yellow blond colour, including that one spot on his eyebrow. The rest of his eyebrows he opted to keep dark brown and just see how purple they get with no bleach.
“It smells like grape!” Ribbit exclaimed. She shoved the dye bottle in his face, getting a bit of purple on his nose in the process. “Smell it.”
Jax backed up, bumping against her chest. “I can smell it,” he said, coughing. “Very strong when it’s up your nose.”
Ribbit kissed the top of his head. “Just trying to dye your nose hairs.” And she laughed.
“Gross.”
Getting the dye evenly distributed throughout all of his (albeit very damaged and uncharacteristically loose) curls took close to forty five minutes. Immediately after Ribbit finished, Jax got purple dye on her shirt by trying to turn around and kiss her cheek as a thank you.
“This would be so much better if we had some form of entertainment,” Jax told her while they were holding each other on a dingy couch.
Ribbit laughed. “Yeah, like if we were watching two people beat the crap out of each other,” she said. Jax laughed with her while he lit up a cigarette.
“Can you imagine?”
Ribbit just hummed in reply.
The rinsing for the hair dye was a lot easier since they knew exactly where to go and who to avoid while there. It doesn’t stop them from laughing and shushing each other the entire time.
This time, Ribbit dragged Jax back to their hiding spot instead of to the dryers. When he tried to ask her why they weren’t drying his hair first, she’d just squeeze his hand and continue dragging him along.
“Sit,” she told him once they got back to their spot, reaching up and shoving him down by his shoulders. “And be patient. This is going to take a while.”
Jax watched in awe as she took wet strands of purple hair and coiled them around her fingers. She would hold the hair for a moment, then she’d carefully remove her hands and scrunch the new curls.
He has a memory of his mother doing this to him when he was very young, back before the place they lived in got too crowded. Running water was provided to them every three days, so his mother would wash his curls for him before hand curling them as they had no products.
Jax doesn’t remember when she stopped doing that; he’s not sure when he lost his curls.
But this was curling his hair for him, and it made him feel loved in a way he hadn’t felt in years.
“Thank you for this,” he whispered once she was almost done.
Ribbit just smiled at him.
The two of them were almost never separated. They’d sleep in the same bed, purple and green hair pooling together on a thin mattress. People kept crowding in, but they never minded. It just pushed them closer to each other.
All they needed were each other.
Jax remembers the day everything happened as if it were yesterday.
She’d gone out on her own, hungry. Jax had been woken up by a gentle kiss before she left with a promise to be back soon.
“I love you,” she had whispered. And Jax mumbled it back, sleepily kissing her.
Looking back, he realized it was the first time they’d ever said that to each other.
When he woke up, she still hadn’t returned, so he traveled through the dark to find her. He tripped over bodies sleeping everywhere, cursing and apologizing to them quietly. The room, halls, and streets in their area were lined with these sleeping people.
He called her name as loudly as he could without disturbing other residents. Maybe she’d gotten lost.
(She’d lived here for nearly a year now. Ten months. Her birthday was next month, and Jax’s was only a few weeks after hers.)
Her green hair, no matter how knotted, was far too recognizable.
And yet, when he saw her laying there in the alley, he convinced himself it wasn’t her. It was another green haired girl who looked exactly like his girl.
He screamed.
Jax doesn’t remember screaming, but he knows he did it. The memories of finding her there are in third person for him, as though he detached from his body and he wasn’t actually there for this.
He wanted to blame muggers for this. Her face was covered in blood, but there were no obvious injuries. Jax held her so gently, pulling her close. He brushed her hair and sang to her until medical teams arrived to take her to a hospital.
Ribbit was dead.
They said it was a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Everyone told him that it wasn’t something she could’ve been saved from. It was too late, all the doctors said.
Jax went through the next few months in a haze. Ribbit’s fifteenth birthday came and went, and so did his sixteenth birthday. He doesn’t remember celebrating or crying or anything.
His mother tried to help him and comfort him. She knew the pain he’d gone through because she’d been through it too when Jax was just a kid. He didn’t remember much about his dad, but he remembered how much he loved Ribbit, so the two of them would often cry together and share stories.
Three months after Ribbit’s death, Jax knew he had to get out of here. All of his emotions were piling in on him.
He packed up everything he owned and told his mother where he was going, in case she ever wanted to visit him. She hugged him, and he left to the major city.
It took days of walking to get to where he wanted to go. He got into several fights from people trying to rob him, even though he didn’t win most of them.
The major city part of Neo Cirque was beautiful. It was summertime now, and the warm air from that and all the hundreds of thousands of bodies was refreshing compared to the still air of the slums.
Jax kept getting into fights with anyone who so much as looked at him wrong. He needed to get his rage out one way or another, and beating the ever-living shit out of strangers sounded like a great way to do that.
One day, a man stopped him after a fight. He handed him a card and winked at him. Jax looked down, seeing just a name and an address. When he looked back up again, the man had disappeared.
Jax went to the address a few hours later after stealing some food from a vendor or two. It was a fighting arena, and a damn fancy one at that. The man was there, waiting for him.
There were no introductions. Just a simple explanation of the rules: if you win, you get paid however much money people bet on you. With this being a rich club, Jax could win hundreds of dollars each night.
He was never scared. All the anger, frustration, and grief channeled itself into sheer power and sloppy fighting. Jax wasn’t fair, making sure to beat people when they were already down, like the world had done to him.
As summer turned to autumn and autumn faded into winter, Jax kept winning bigger and bigger prizes. The rich people loved to watch him lose his mind and transfer that into pain and power. He felt sick when he heard their cheers, but he was earning a minimum of $600 each day, so he ignored it.
It didn’t matter how sick or tired he felt. After just six months of fighting, at barely sixteen and a half years old, Jax had over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He had no home, so he fought every second his body held itself up.
Then, one day, he met an older man.
(Looking back, the man was definitely not old in the slightest. He was twenty five. Jax was just a kid.)
They were meant to fight each other, but the man refused. He kept saying he wasn’t going to fight someone who was clearly a kid, going so far as to refuse to even step into the ring with Jax.
“Don’t be a little bitch,” Jax taunted. He didn’t mean it. Not really, anyway. He just knew that they’d both be fired by the company if they didn’t just do as they were told.
“You’re a kid,” the man argued. “I’m twice your size and probably a decade your senior.”
“You’ll both be fired if you don’t do as you’re told,” their boss told them.
The thought made Jax’s blood run cold.
“Just get in the fucking ring, dude!” he shouted. He was so scared. “C’mon. I’ll go easy on you, old man.”
The man didn’t move.
“Alright. Collect whatever you made today. You’re both fired.”
Jax’s heart sank into his stomach. He wanted to scream at the top of his lungs and beat the life out of that man. Now Jax didn’t have any sort of income, and even though he had a bit of a cushion, it wasn’t going to last him forever.
When Jax walked over to give that man a piece of his mind, the older man simply held out a hand.
“Nice to meet you,” he said cheerfully. “Walk with me.”
Jax didn’t bother shaking the man’s hand, but he did follow him.
“You’ve wanted to get out of here for a while.” It wasn’t a question, just a simple observation. “I see it in the way you fight.”
Jax spat as he walked. “Yeah? So what?” He tried to sound as annoyed as possible to hide the fear.
“Why don’t you?” he asked.
“I’ve got no one to go to.” Jax didn’t know why he was admitting this to a stranger.
“What if we started something together?” the man offered.
“I don’t even know you.” He wanted to say yes so badly.
“If you did, would you do it?”
There was no hesitation when he said, “Yes. Immediately.”
Again, the man stuck out his hand with a grin on his face. “Kinger.”
Jax shook it cautiously. “Jax.”
“Nice to meet you. Now, where should we begin?”