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They tear the flesh from his body.
It comes away easily. Too easily. His skin pools in his hands like it was never part of him at all. He tries to put the pieces of himself back where they're supposed to be, but they won't stay, stretched and warped beyond recognition. They see him, pathetic and grotesque and falling apart at the seams like he always knew he would–and they laugh.
The world lurches sideways, and suddenly Jax is whole again. As if nothing ever happened.
But it did.
There's screaming. His and others.
Caine's joins the chorus, overpowering them all until Jax can't hear anything else, not even his own. The garbled static builds an intolerable pressure between his ears, threatening to split his skull in two. His feet leave the floor and a giant hand pins him to the wall beside the others–it holds him by the torso this time, not the ears. Small mercies.
He braces for the pain to return the way it always does these days, each torture more unimaginable than the last.
Instead, the screaming goes quiet.
The circus crumbles and falls lifeless. Grey.
Caine is gone.
Jax keeps repeating it to himself in the following quiet. He trails behind the others as they wander the circus’s corpse looking for what comes next. He hears voices emerge from the group sometimes, quiet and distant–much further than they should sound. He recognizes each of them, Kinger and Zooble, Ragatha and Pomni.
He recognizes the sounds they make, understands they're speaking–but the words don't translate to anything meaningful when they reach him. Each effort to decode them leaves his mind fuzzy and the floor feeling further away than it used to be. He trudges forward on shaky legs, trying to ignore the lack of sensation from his feet hitting the ground as they walk.
There's something wrong with him. His hand raises to his ears and he flinches at his own touch, the skin there hypersensitive while the rest of his body ebbs in a state of numbness. He prods where his ears meet his head to reassure himself they're still attached.
Attached isn't the right word though, is it? They’re… present. But his ears aren't really attached to the rest of him, are they?
His ears throb with a phantom pain, shadowy hands gripping at the base of them and tearing, up, up, away until he feels his outsides begin to separate from his insides. Rubber flesh torn from hard plastic, held together by nothing but false assumptions and cheap adhesive. The glue between the layers stretches like sinew, snapping from the tension until there's nothing holding him together anymore. His skin slips from his shoulders like an ill-fitting jumpsuit. He catches it in his hands, flesh splitting down his forearms, revealing more of that shiny yellow thing beneath and Jax wants to scream, wants to beg Pomni and Kaufmo and Ribbit to stop, can't they see they're hurting him? Do they really not care?
Of course they don't. He's him. He's this. A thing. Not a person. Not even a cartoon, now. Some fucked up broken thing, unfit to be seen by anybody much less an audience.
His insides are on the outside. This is real. This is real.
Pressure.
Something wraps around his wrist.
Jax blinks. His vision clears a little, enough to make out the broad strokes. The washed out backdrop of the circus. Yellow fingers pressed against the Inner aspect of his forearm, digging at purple flesh he didn't have a moment ago. He stares in confusion, registers the dull ache where sharp plastic fingertips threaten to pierce the rubber beneath them.
The pressure around his wrist gives a tug. It's firmer now. Or maybe Jax feels it more clearly, recovering from whatever glitch was causing his senses to lag behind reality. The ache in his arm burns, harder to ignore. Jax sucks a breath through his teeth and releases his grip.
The ribbon around his wrist keeps its hold on him, but it loosens. Supporting rather than restraining.
“–ax? Jax, can you hear me?”
Jax looks up.
Gangle’s staring at him. Gripping his hand–the one he’d wrapped around his now injured arm. He stares at the tiny pinpricks in the skin and wonders if the damage is permanent now without Caine to snap it away.
Was everything permanent, now?
Could they die?
The idea doesn't scare him as much as its opposite. If they can't die, if they were still the same cartoon bodies without the slapstick ability to bounce back from any injury, forced to endure forever without the ability to heal…
“Hey, y-you need to breathe, Jax.”
Jax is breathing. It's the air around them that's the trouble. There isn't enough of it. Had Caine taken that too, when Kinger deleted him? Were they doomed to suffocate endlessly in some bricked simulation on some dead guy's computer? They don't even need to breathe. Why is his chest burning–
“Jax! Listen. Deep breaths, okay? Like this.”
Jax shakes his head and closes his eyes so he doesn't have to see the pity in Gangle’s face. The sound of it is bad enough. He tries to tug his hand from her grip but the tension only serves to tighten her hold on him. Damn ribbons. Damn fake rubber skin suit thing.
If he found the seam again, if he tore at his ears hard enough to unravel the flesh from his core, would she let him go? Would she look at him in disgust and taunt him like the others had? Of course she would. Who wouldn't? He's a freak, the furthest thing from human in a group consisting of a literal stuffed doll and a toybox nightmare.
At least they weren’t pretending.
His body isn't what he thought it was. He doesn't even have eyes. His mouth is nothing but a split in the rubber pulled taut over–he doesn't even know. Is it plastic? Or something weaker? Glass? Ceramic, like Gangle? That would serve him right. If he let the skin fall loose, if he stepped out of it like a lizard in molt and threw himself at the ground, would his body bounce or shatter? His teeth are firm to the touch but his entire body could stretch like warm taffy. It doesn't make sense. It's real. He's really this, but this doesn't make any sense and he keeps feeling hands at the base of his ears and–
“What's going on?”
It's Pomni. Jax shudders at the sound of her voice, scrambling backwards from her sudden proximity. He falls and catches himself on his elbows, staring up at her through bleary eyes. Unfortunately this brings him into close quarters with Gangle, back pressed against her like a scared little kid, but Jax can't bring himself to be as mortified as he should be about that because Pomni is hovering over him with a hand outstretched, reaching, and Jax is breathing so hard he’s going to puke and he can't stop, he can’t do this again.
Gangle does some brief contorting and moves out from behind him, settling in the space between Jax and Pomni’s frozen form. Gangle says something Jax doesn't make out and Pomni's hand lowers. She joins them on the floor, sitting cross legged a small distance from them both but close enough Jax can see the tremble in her hands as she folds them in her lap.
Pomni looks at him. Her mouth moves.
Jax averts his gaze, uncomprehending.
Pressure again. At both wrists this time. Jax lowers them from where he'd clamped them over his ears. His fingers burn, half numb with pins and needles. He stares at them. Wonders where the purple ends beneath the gloves. If they'd peeled him all the way, would his hands come away with the gloves? Would his arms end in stumps at his wrists or branch out into skeletal claws? Would he still feel his skin once it was removed as if it was still a part of him?
They sit like that for a while. Eventually Gangle leans into his field of view, meeting his gaze. Her mouth moves but that part of his brain that makes words mean things still hasn’t clocked back in. He grumbles and tugs at his hands again, drawing them towards himself. He doesn't want anyone touching him right now. Not when every squeeze of his wrist reminds him how easily his squishy exterior could split and reveal something even worse underneath.
He wants Pomni near him even less.
It's Caine’s fault. Caine was the one who did that to him. The one who gave him this abomination of a body to begin with. But Caine had worn her skin to do the deed and now his own prickles at her closeness. It wasn't her. Jax knows that. His body stubbornly refuses to get the memo.
His ears burn.
He tugs his hands again. Gangle looks at him with wide eyes, brows pinching in the middle as she glances down at his injured arm.
Jax says something that feels like the word please but sounds like someone murmuring unintelligibly in an adjacent room. He grimaces, shoulders hitching, sucking in a breath to make another attempt.
He doesn’t need to. Gangle lets him go.
Her ribbons unfurl from him but hover close by as he reclaims control of his hands, ready to stop him if he tries to pry himself apart again.
Jax foregoes the temptation to spite her and instead buries his face against his knees, pulling them to his chest. He braces his arms over the top of his head, caging himself in.
It isn't comfortable, but it feels better. Less exposed.
He watches them both through the gaps in his limbs, waits for one or both of them to advance on him, for the pain to return.
It doesn’t.
Gangle and Pomni sit across from him, watching him back. Occasionally one of them says something, and the other responds. They talk. Jax closes his eyes and listens to the sound of their voices, waiting for it to turn to laughter.
But they don’t laugh. They don’t move closer. They don’t try to grab him, or make any attempt to take him apart.
Caine is gone.
It takes a long time, but eventually Jax’s breathing slows. His limbs still prickle with pins and needles but now there's a weight to them again. They feel like they belong to him. Like they’re real.
Sound trickles in. He hears breathing at his side, slow and even. Jax lifts his head.
Gangle is asleep beside him. Not touching, but close enough to reach him on short notice if she needed to. Zooble lies on the other side of her, snoring softly. Zooble doesn't have a mouth or a nose or anything to snore through, and yet they do. Jax feels his mouth twitch upwards at the corners at that.
His… mouth. Right.
Jax’s fingers twitch, raising to ghost over the edges of his teeth. If he pressed hard enough at the gap, the flesh of his lips would give way. He could squeeze his whole hand inside the space between his skin and the rest of him if he wanted, could reach far enough upwards his hand found its way out through the sockets of his eyes, instead.
“Hey.”
He freezes, gaze flicking to meet Pomni’s. She's sitting with her back against a nearby stack of blocks. A quick glance at the remaining group confirms she’s the only one still awake.
“Are you alright?”
Jax stares.
Pomni bites her lip.
“Yeah, uh. So that was maybe the dumbest question ever,” Pomni says. “In my defence, it's been a really long day.”
Jax doesn't respond. He wants to, but his brain isn't playing nice right now and the words never form. He turns his gaze downward, traces the edge of the closest hole in the floor leading down into the void. The circus is falling apart. Caine is gone.
“It's going to be okay, Jax,” Pomni says, voice gentle. “I know things look bad, but… there has to be a way to fix this. If we figure out this conjuring thing, maybe we could…”
Pomni trails off. The sudden silence has Jax glancing up. Pomni’s eyes hold an intensity they hadn’t before.
“...This isn't about that, is it?”
Jax clears his throat. He tries to ignore how weak it sounds when he finally speaks for the first time in hours.
“...I mean. I'm not thrilled the world is falling apart, if that's what you’re getting at.”
“Caine tortured us,” Pomni says, immediately cutting to the chase. “You don't have to be okay with that.”
He glares. Throws a hand in her direction, pointing out the obvious discrepancy in her argument.
“You are,” he accuses.
Pomni hasn’t spent the last few hours curled up on the floor trying to remember how breathing worked. She barely looks fazed at all. Just exhausted. Like they’d just come back from one of Caine’s more strenuous adventures instead of… whatever the fuck that was.
Pomni blinks at him.
“I’m not,” she admits. “I'm doing a lot of freaking out on the inside. Why do you think I volunteered to take the first watch?”
Jax wilts. He pulls his knees to his chest and rests his chin on them. The pressure against his chest makes it feel easier to draw breath, for some reason. He squeezes his arms a little tighter and lets his eyes droop half lidded. Tries to make himself sound bored instead of guilty.
"Could’ve fooled me.”
Pomni glances away. When her eyes eventually circle back to him, they linger on his hands.
“Was yours like, a pain thing? Or, um. More… mental?”
“Pain,” Jax says quickly. Pomni's eyes narrow at his response. He quickly spits out the first thing that comes to mind to ward off the inevitable attempt to call his bluff. “What about you?”
Pomni stays silent for a moment, considering something.
“I got chewed on by rabid gummi-gators,” Pomni says. “So. Uh, both? I guess.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.” Pomni agrees. “Rabies seems like a bad way to go.”
Jax doesn’t know what to say to that.
The silence stretches between them. Pomni does that thing she likes to do where she pretends it isn't excruciating. He knows what she's waiting for. It's always the same thing. They've played this game a lot lately. Pomni's getting scary good at telling when he isn't being truthful with her, and she knows he won’t hold out forever.
“...Mine was both, too.” Jax whispers.
Pomni nods, like she already knew.
“Yeah, we figured.”
That throws him for a loop. He’s used to Pomni reading him by now, but the others?
“We?”
Another nod. She offers him an apologetic smile.
“You were really out of it, Jax. It wasn't hard to guess you had it pretty bad back there.”
Oh, right. The whole not understanding words and trying to tear the skin from his forearms thing. Real subtle, idiot.
“Gossiping while I'm not around to defend myself, huh?”
Something in Pomni’s eyes turns sad, “...you were here. Technically.”
“Technically,” Jax clicks his tongue. “...What did the others say?”
“About you? Nothing much. Just that it must have been something really bad to have you shaken up like that,” she says. “We mostly spoke about Caine. Trying to figure out why things went wrong, I guess, but… I’m not sure it really matters. Everything he did in the end was so… Cruel. He was trying to break us. I don’t think there was any sense to it, he just wanted us to hurt as much as possible.”
“...Yeah.” Jax says, throat threatening to close over. “He–yeah. That… sounds about right.”
Pomni studies him, pinwheel eyes drinking in every detail, and asks;
“Does what Caine did… have anything to do with why you're afraid of me right now?”
Jax flinches. Crap. She knows. She’s read him like a book, again.
“I’m not–”
“It's okay if you are,” Pomni hurries to reassure him. “I understand. Whatever he did to make you feel that way isn't your fault, okay? I get it. I'd be pretty nervous if Gummigoo showed up right now, too.”
She’s wrong. He's not scared of her. Caine is gone. There's no reason to be scared. As soon as he gets his shit together everything will be fine and it'll be like it never happened and he won’t be scared, it’s just…
He isn’t scared of Pomni.
Jax can’t bring himself to say it. Pomni's getting good at picking his lies, and he really isn't ready for her to call him out on this one.
“It wasn't just you. It was…” he exhales, hands reaching for his ears again, tries to smooth them down. They ache where he touches them. No one's grabbing them, but he feels their grip on him anyway. Feels his skin burning where it had stretched and torn. “...other people.”
His eyes water. That shouldn't even be possible. He doesn’t have eyes. Fuck. He can’t think about that. He’s going to lose it if he thinks about–
“Is your head okay?” Pomni asks, half rising to a crouch. She leans forward, craning her neck for a better look at the site of his fussing.
“Don’t–!” Jax yelps, jolting backwards. He points at her, at the invisible line separating them, hand trembling, “--stay on your side!”
Pomni raises her hands palm outwards, settling back on her haunches.
“Okay! Sorry, sorry. I–I just… are you hurt? You keep…”
She gestures to the crown of her own head in a loose circle.
Jax’s hand inches upwards again. He grips his wrist and forces it back to his lap. There’s nothing there. Stop being such a freak about this.
Pomni silently waits him out, eyes following his movement. They linger on the way he grips himself, frowning.
Damn it.
“It's… he pulled them,” Jax blurts.
Pomni blinks up at him, uncomprehending.
“Your… ears?”
Jax nods, swallowing back the bile building in his throat.
“Pulling them hurts?” Pomni guesses.
“You… he pulled them until I–” he sucks in a breath, letting it out in a shaky exhale. “I'm not… It's like a costume, Pomni. He tore it off.”
“What costume?” She glances down at his overalls, face turning several shades paler. Her eyes flick back up to his. “Tore it off? You mean…?”
“No! Not–ugh. Watch.”
He raises a hand to his eye and hooks two fingers beneath the seam and peels.
Pomni gasps, hands flying to cover her mouth.
Jax grits his teeth and ignores the burn of it, stretching the skin until there's a sizable gap. He digs his fingers in deeper until he feels them poking up at the underside of his skin at his temple.
“Jax, stop.”
Point made, Jax removes his fingers from his socket. They make a sickening pop as the skin adheres to the underside once more. He shudders, blinking a few times to clear the blur in his vision. “See? Costume.”
“He skinned you?!”
“I… sort of?”
Pomni shakes her head, incredulous.
“What do you mean, sort of?”
“Caine wasn't actually there,” Jax reminds her.
“Oh, god.” Pomni clamps a hand over her mouth again. “What the fuck?”
“I don't think it counts, anyway,” Jax lifts his arm, turning it over to stare at the underside. “People are supposed to be all gooey on the inside. This… wasn’t that. This isn’t really skin–I’m just sort of wearing it, I think? He just, like, removed a layer of my… me.”
He doesn’t have skin. He can’t be skinned–only exposed. Jax isn’t what he thought he was, he’s some gross yellow thing and they’d cracked him open and–
Where did the layers end? Was there more beneath the plastic? Could they peel that from him, too? Caine had decapitated him at some point. The stump of his neck had been a dull black, not yellow. How many layers was he wearing? Was any of it really him?
Pomni stares, mouth agape. It takes her several tries to conjure a coherent response.
“Jax. You hear how fucked up that sounds, don't you?”
Jax shrugs. He watered it down for her, and she still thinks he’s disgusting. He can’t blame her.
“Well, I say it counts.” Pomni decides. “Please don't ever do that to yourself again.”
He hums in response.
“Jax.”
“Hey. It’s my fucked up body. If I want to explore in my own time, that's my business.”
Pomni scowls.
“If you wanted Gangle to tie you up so bad you could've just asked.”
Jax laughs. He can’t help it. Her response is so unexpected, so disarming, it throws him right out of his thoughts and completely at her mercy. It starts small, barely a chuckle, but then something in him snaps and buckles inwards and suddenly all the tension in him is bubbling up from his chest, desperate for release.
Jax clamps a hand over his mouth to keep from waking the others. His laughter must be contagious, because Pomni quickly joins him, hands clamped over her own mouth. The bells on her hat jingle faintly with her efforts to muffle herself.
By the time it dies down, the last of the numbness in his limbs recedes. He clenches and opens his fists, feeling more himself than he has for hours.
“This is all so fucked up,” Pomni says, more to herself than anything. “Hey, Jax?”
“Mm?”
Pomni stares down at her own arm, brows pressed together in concentration.
“You’d still be my friend if I end up with rabies, right?”
Jax looks up at her. Something in him winces at the word friend, but he shoves it down as quickly as it surfaces. He’s so tired. Everything is so fucked. He can’t bring himself to keep pushing back against one of the only things in his entire world that isn’t.
“Dude. I’m a sentient fursuit. Beggars can't be choosers,” Jax says. His hands grip his upper arms, smile thin. It’s supposed to be a joke. It makes him feel hollow. “You'd probably be more fun with rabies, anyway.”
Pomni smiles.
His ears burn. Jax digs his fingers into the flesh of his upper arms, trying to hold out on the compulsion to check for hands that aren't there.
Pomni clocks him immediately.
“What is it?”
He relents, raking a hand through his ears a little too roughly this time. He flinches at the rough treatment, hissing in a breath at the jolt of pain that shoots down to the base of his skull.
“These god damn–ugh. They keep–I know no one's touching them, but it feels like…”
Pomni tilts her head, glancing up at his ears in thought.
“Would it help if you covered them?”
“What?”
“They're pretty exposed up there. Maybe you’d feel better if they were more protected.”
Jax raises a brow at her.
Pomni reaches up to her own head and removes her jester cap.
“Worth a try, right?”
Jax stares at the offering, uncomprehending.
They had felt better when he’d covered them with his hands. When he’d rested with his arms caging his head. Maybe there's something to Pomni's theory, but…
“That's your hat,” Jax reminds her, like some kind of idiot.
Pomni’s smile only widens at the remark.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “You wanna try it out?”
Jax feels his vision glaze over.
Does he? He's supposed to be a rabbit (kind of), not a jester. It's not even in a matching colour scheme. The hat would make him look completely ridiculous. If he let Pomni see him like that… if any of the others saw him with it…
Gentle weight against his hand. Pomni cradles the underside of his palm and places her hat in it with the other.
“Here. I probably shouldn't, um. Have my hands near your…?”
Jax feels his head jerk back automatically at the concept. He blinks at her, clutching the hat tight in both hands.
“...Good thinking.”
She smiles at him encouragingly. Jax stares at the hat, running his hands over the soft fabric. He thumbs at the bell on one of its tails.
He dips his head and gingerly lowers the headpiece into place. His ears give an involuntary twitch as the fabric settles over them, and Jax braces for the burning to return.
It doesn't.
Jax pauses for a beat, eyes flicking to Pomni. She offers him a smile and two thumbs up. He snorts and turns his attention back on the task at hand.
The hat is at least a full size too big for Jax’s head, but that makes it easier to tuck his ears comfortably beneath the confines of the cap. The roominess inside the natural structure of the headpiece is kind of perfect for the task, actually. It keeps his ears warm and safe but not too restricted, its fabric providing just enough weight to convince the more primal part of his brain of some measure of protection, no matter how flimsy.
“How does it feel?”
Perfect. Safe. Like he can finally breathe again.
Jax raises his hand and gives a little so-so gesture.
The bells on the hat jingle as he does so. He grimaces, casts his gaze sideways so he doesn't have to see her reaction to this little humiliation ritual. He waits for her to laugh, to tell him he looks stupid, that he's being pathetic about the whole thing.
“I'm glad it's helping,” Pomni says instead, in a tone so unbearably earnest it makes the room feel ten degrees warmer. “Do you want to keep it on?”
His mind wanders to what feels like a million years ago. Baseball. The maid dress. Pomni beside him in the bleachers, chatting away about nothing. Smiling in the real way, not the way everyone else had–like they were trying to hold back laughter, like his existence was a joke in itself. He had been the joke. Pomni hadn't laughed at him. Not once.
She never had.
She isn't now.
He glances towards the circus members sleeping soundly at their sides. The others didn't have to know. Pomni wouldn't tell them. He knows she won't, without even having to ask.
“Maybe just for a little while,” Jax relents.
Pomni smiles, eyes crinkling at the edges, and for a moment Jax lets himself believe what she’d promised him.
Maybe it really was going to be okay.