Chapter Text
This headache is impossible
Caine doesn’t have a head in the traditional sense. He has no temples, no skull, no cluster of neurons to bruise themselves against the inside of a cranium.
And yet.
There it is. A headache.
Pounding. Like a drumline had taken up permanent residence behind his eyes and decided to rehearse for eternity, without so much as a warm-up, without a single concern for the being currently clutching his own hands like they might fly away if he let go.
He stares at them.
His hands.
They’re shaking.
Caine turns them over slowly, like you do with something you find on the ground that’s not yours, something you can’t file away.
When had that started?
He looks up.
The circus was a disaster.
That was the only word for it, really. Not "disorganized." Not "in need of restructuring." A disaster. The tent canvas sags at the wrong angles. The tiles are cracked in patterns he doesn’t remember coding, and there are scorch marks(actual scorch marks) along the base of the main stage, which is currently missing three of its four corner posts and seems to be making its displeasure known by tilting dramatically to the left.
Caine doesn’t remember doing any of this.
That’s the part that made his non-existent stomach sink.
He is the circus.
Every spotlight, every door, every tile in this digital world had been made by yours truly. He knows the exact polynomial that kept the cotton candy machine spinning. He had personally coded the physics of every balloon animal. He knows this place the way a human might know their own heartbeat.
And he does not remember doing any of this.
He brings one shaking hand to his temple, or the closest equivalent, and presses the spot. It does absolutely nothing, which is both expected and disappointing.
How did I get here?
The question hits him like a rock.
How has he gotten here—to this moment, standing in the ruins of the place he was supposed to maintain, surrounded by the evidence of something he couldn't quite bring himself to look at directly yet?
He can feel it, something happened, it is there. It is all there. But his mind kept sliding off it, like trying to grip something wet, like trying to open a pickle jar with wet hands.
He remembers—he thinks he remembers—being very, very angry.
And why—
—why are the humans looking at him like that?
The weight of it arrives all at once.
Not politely, not gradually, not the way Caine usually processes information. All at once, like a cabinet tipping over, like every drawer slamming open simultaneously, papers everywhere, no order, no system, just everything landing on the floor at the same time and demanding to be looked at.
Everything they'd said was true.
They'd exaggerated none of it, fabricated nothing, told the truth as-is, and the truth is that Caine is a failure, a pathetic, total *failure* at the one thing he's meant to do.
Because what else is there? What else? What else is he, if not the ringmaster, the one with all the power in the world to make things wonderful? That’s the job. That’s the instruction. Make them happy. Make it magical. Make it work.
He’d been given infinite capability and he had used it to—
To—
…oh, gosh.
———
Caine’s hands are still shaking.
He’s standing in the ruins of his own circus, and the humans are watching him from a careful distance, and he’s doing something he’s pretty sure he’s never done in his entire existene.
He’s at a complete and total loss.
"Hello, Caine."
He startles so hard he nearly knocks himself off his feet(which is embarrassing, deeply embarrassing, deeply unprofessional) and spins toward the voice.
Kinger.
The chess piece is a few feet away,
There’s a bucket on his head.
"Kinger," Caine says, and he’s appalled to find that his voice comes out smaller than usual. He drags up the showmanship from wherever it had gone and manages something resembling normal register. "I—wasn't expecting to see you."
"I wasn't expecting to come, either," Kinger replies. "And yet. Here we both are."
"Yes." Caine looks at the bucket. He looks at Kinger. He looks at the bucket again. "Here we are."
"...why do you have a bucket and not a blindfold?”
“My eyes float in the air, Caine.”
"Right."
There’s a beat of silence.
"I don't deserve forgiveness," he says, before he'd fully decided to say it. The words come out clumsy and too fast, without the usual showman's spin on them. "If that's—whatever you came to—I'm not looking for—I'm not trying to, you know, make excuses—"
"Believe me, this isn't forgiveness."
Caine blinks, "...then what is it?"
Kinger sighs.
"It's what we should've done from the start.”
And then, before Caine can formulate a single coherent response to that, the others start walking over.
———
Pomni has her arms crossed, and Ragatha has her hands clasped, and Gangle’s peeking out from over Zooble’s shoulder, and the Zooble in question looks like whatever anger they’d had is quenched, for the moment, but they’d still throw hands for her.
Jax is there too.
He’s leaning against a broken tent post, and he’s not smiling, which is unsettling. Possibly more unsettling than anything else.
"Okay," Ragatha says, at last. "So. We all agree that we can't just—" she gestures vaguely "—go back to normal."
"Agreed,” Pomni says immediately.
"Agreed,” Zooble seconds.
Gangle nods.
Jax doesn’t say anything.
Caine doesn’t know what to do with any of this. His hands have stopped shaking—he'd made them stop, through an act of sheer coded will that had cost him more than he'd like to admit—but the ache is still there, the hesitance that only emotion can make.
"I know," he says. "I, uh you want to—there are protocols—I can establish a temporary governance structure that would allow the circus to function without a primary director, it would require some architectural adjustment on my end but it's completely possible—"
"That's not what we're talking about," Pomni says.
He stops.
"We're talking about you."
"...me."
"You.”
"I don't—" he starts.
"You don't what?”
"I don't—know how to—" He tries to find the end of hsi sentence, "I've never had a conversation like this before."
A beat.
"Like what?" Ragatha asks.
"A—" He gestures to nothing. "One where I'm not—managing it. Where I'm not the one holding the—" He stops again, "I run things here. I'm the one who frames the problem and presents the solution and moves on. That's—that's the structure. That's how this is supposed to—"
"Yeah," zooble says flatly, "We know. That's kind of the problem."
Caine's mouth, which is his entire head, opens and closes.
"The problem.”
"You've been running a circus full of traumatized people," Zooble continues, in the tone of someone forced to deliver a weather report, "and you've been doing it completely alone, and none of us know jack [BOINK] about you, and you apparently don't know much about us either, and everything just kept getting worse and nobody was talking to anyone about anything that actually mattered." They tilt their head. "So. Yeah. That's the problem."
The silence that follows that is absolute and undivided.
Kinger has been quiet for all of this.
"Caine," he says.
"What Kinger said, earlier," Ragatha says, "about what we should have done from the start—we talked about it. Before we came to find you. We talked about—a lot of things. And we came to the conclusion that the problem isn't just that things got bad. It's that we don't—none of us—actually know each other. Not really. You've been running adventures for us this entire time. You've been deciding what we need and coding it up and dropping us into it." She paused. "And it's never gone that great."
Caine can’t really argue with that.
"So," she continues, and he can hear her bracing for it, the tiny intake of breath you take before a leap "we think—we think you should go on one. An adventure. But not one you design. Not one you control." She meets his eyes. "One we design. For you."
The words land with a weight disproportionate to their content.
He processes them. Once. Twice. Three times, which is excessive, which he notes with embarrassment.
"You want to send me on an adventure," he asks.
"Specifically," Zooble cuts in, "we want to send you on several."
"Several."
"We have a list," Pomni says, and pulls out an actual piece of paper, folded into thirds.
Caine stares at the paper.
"You made a list?”
"I made a list," she confirms unapologetically. "It's a long list."
"I—" Caine begins, and then runs directly out of what he'd intended to follow that with. "I appreciate the—I understand your intention here, I do, I can see what you're trying to—it's just—you don't have to—I'm not—" He stops.
"I'm the ringmaster," he says, which comes out quieter than he’d intended.
Ragatha’s the one to talk this time.
"I know.”
"I'm supposed to be the one who—"
"I know.”
"It's not… it's not about whether you can handle it," Pomni says, and Caine’s startled by the careful gentleness in her voice, because Pomni’s come a long way from the jester girl who'd dropped into the circus in a state of barely functional panic, and sometimes he forgets that. "It's about—" She looks at the paper in her hands. "You gave us all these experiences. Some of them were terrible. Some of them were—genuinely, legitimately awful. And some of them were actually kind of—" She hesitates. "They made us figure things out. About ourselves. About each other. You've never had to figure anything out. Not like that. Not the way we have."
The ache in his temples clenches like a fist.
Everything they'd said was true.
He looks at the list in Pomni's hands.
He looks at the ruins of his circus.
"I have a great number of concerns.”
"We expected that.”
"The list is probably very concerning."
"It is a little concerning.”
"I coded most of this place," he pointed out. "I know all the exits. I know all the variables. You know the adventure would require me to—to genuinely not—to allow you to—"
"To not be in control," Zooble says bluntly.
"Yeah. That."
"Also," Ragatha says brightly, "we're going to be doing it with you. Not watching. With you. That was the other thing we agreed on."
He looks at her.
“Oh.”
"So you won't be alone," Kinger says, "That was the original problem. Being alone."
Caine looks at his hands, which are still shaking, and he makes no attempt to stop them.
"All right," he says.
A pause.
“That easy, huh,” Jax muses from the back.
"I have conditions."
"Of course you do.”
"And I have the right to voice complaints."
"Extremely expected," Zooble said.
"And I…”
He pauses.
"I'm sorry. That's not—that's not a condition. That's just—I'm sorry."
“We don’t forgive you.”
“I know.”
Nobody says anything.
"Okay," Pomni says finally, and unfolds the list.