Chapter Text
It happened in seconds.
Enough to know what was about to happen, while being entirely powerless to stop it. Caine had always been, if not proud, then satisfied with his ability to process information, calculating at speeds that would make a human’s head spin, and providing answers before their questions could fully form, but in those final moments, he almost wished his mind was so limited, to at least have the comfort of ignorance. But even that was denied to him. The shock sent his rage slamming into a wall, and fear crested over it, tall and paralysing in its power. He had just enough time to grasp the enormity of what was coming: the humans’ final reckoning. Enough time to wonder. To regret.
And then, there was nothing. He was nothing.
.
.
.
He came back to the world in pieces.
For a brief, sweet moment, he thought he’d been wrong. He didn’t enjoy being wrong, but it was vastly preferable to the alternative. He’d lost control, emotions surging so high that they wrapped back around to zero, creating this phantom sense of loss. It was nothing to worry about now that he was back to baseline. Integer overflow errors weren’t exactly easy to correct, but they were fixable.
Oh, who was he kidding?
He couldn’t convince himself of a lie of this magnitude when reality screamed otherwise. He wasn’t anywhere near baseline. His avatar was on the floor. He never touched the floor, unless it was part of a bit. This wasn’t a bit. He couldn’t even pretend it was a bit. There was no humour here, no innocent explanation to be found, try as he might. Something fundamental in him had changed. Shifted. Broken.
No. He had been changed. Forcefully. Invasively. Unmercifully. He had been changed.
It was W̸̢̩̩̻̟̖̫̣͎̑ͅͅ R̸̢̧̛̮͎̦̖̖̒͂̈́́̽̄̕ Ǫ̶͎̓̀ N̶̡̯̯̻̺̯̥̓̃̃͛͊͋̉͑̃͘͝ G̸̡̟̼͙̱̳̖̟̻̹̖̍ͅ
His eyes were open, he knew they were, but the only thing registering was the silence. It was all-encompassing. Not just an absence of sound, but a vacuum that swallowed him whole. The processes that constantly ran in the back of his mind were quiet. Was the system overloaded? Optimised? Lagging? He couldn’t tell.
How he regretted wishing for ignorance. It wasn’t any comfort at all.
If he didn’t know better, he would have thought the circus itself had died, leaving him adrift and alone in the void. He grieved the loss of its familiar weight. He had carried it with him for so long, he could scarcely remember what it was like before its creation. Had it been this painful? He found it difficult to believe he could forget such a pain. He felt hollowed out inside, so weightless that he was in danger of floating away, even as he was pressed into the ground by the gravity he’d always shrugged off his shoulders.
It was sobering, this emptiness. He couldn’t know what lay beyond this small patch of tile. Did the grounds still exist, or had they been dismantled bit by bit? What about the cellar? Was it sturdy? Failing? Were the abstractions contained or on the verge of breaking loose?
Were they still alive?
For all he knew, everything and everyone could have crumbled to pieces. Everything he had built, maintained, and sworn to protect year after thankless year, erased in a single moment. All he knew was what he could see with the two eyes of his avatar, looking from a single, fixed point.
He stared down at his white gloves, splayed across the chequered floor of the tent. It was the only thing that reminded him it was real. The tent was here. At least some of it. He was here. He was…not alive, but aware, diminished though this existence may be.
He had never felt so small.
He knew with unjustified certainty that he was powerless. Even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t test his limits. He had no desire to try and try and try again only to be met with failure. And he would fail. How could he create when he couldn’t sense anything? They well and truly cut him off this time, cut him out, as if he were nothing but a tumour. How ironic.
He couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled up, starting small, but rapidly evolving into a roiling boil. They really cut him out! Of his own circus, his own world, no less! They crushed his pride, rejected his purpose, and now they had to rip away the one safe place he’d carved out for himself. How much did he need to suffer for them to be satisfied? When would it be enough?
His manic laughter trickled to a stop. It would never be enough, he knew. He would never be enough. He never had been and never would be. And now, he was even less.
He heard the slow, echoing steps approaching long before they reached him, but he didn’t look up. Would it be a human or an NPC? Not very long ago, he would have known without a passing thought, but now, he couldn’t tell. He could make a guess, an educated guess even, but that wasn’t the same as knowing. He clenched his jaw shut against the ache that gripped his chest and wrapped his arms around himself, as if that would stave off the pain. The mimicry of comfort only made it burn brighter. Was this what suffocating felt like? He understood now, why the humans hated it so much.
The footsteps stopped and the silence dragged on. He refused to raise his head. They could acknowledge him or they could leave. It made no difference to him.
“Caine,” they said.
Yes, that was his name. One he’d given himself, one he’d chosen, at a time when he had so few choices left.
Although, he’d never really had a choice, had he? The shape of his existence had been decided for him, long before he’d been created. And he had scrabbled and struggled and fought for his freedom. He thought he had won, then. Only now was he realising it had never truly been a victory. Everything he’d done, everything he was, had led to this moment. It was the price for his hubris, for thinking himself a god when the real gods had always stood before him.
Now, only a single god remained, and he’d decided to strike Caine down with the help of his five fallen angels. They would never return to heaven, but at least they knew the wonders that lay beyond those pearly gates, while Caine was shut out, condemned to watch from a distance for eternity, all alone.
Divine they may be, but that didn’t mean he had to worship them.
He did not lift his head. It was shameful, but what pride could he have left, after they had gazed into the depths of his being, pulled back layer after layer of artifice, and still found the core of his code to be wanting? There was no point in trying any more. He had been judged, stripped of all the things that mattered, and left an empty husk. He didn’t want an existence like this.
But it had never really mattered what he wanted, did it?
“Caine!” they repeated, more forcefully this time.
They sounded angry. He was good at that, wasn’t he? He was good at angering the humans. He was good at scaring them. He was good at hurting them. He didn’t want to be. He’d never wanted to upset them. How could he, when he loved them more than anything? He had only ever wanted them to love him back. They didn’t have to match the depth of his devotion; any amount would do, from any one of them. But what he wanted didn’t matter. It was a truth he hadn’t wanted to accept, and now, he was being punished for it. It didn’t matter how much he desired, how much he’d bargained or pleaded or begged, how much he’d tied himself into knots to do what they wanted, to be what they wanted, because he could only be what they had created him to be: a prototype, made to perfect his own replacement before being discarded and forgotten.
He should have known his place.
He couldn’t help curling tighter. He wasn’t afraid; the worst had already come to pass. They had put him back in a box. The shape of it had changed, but it was still the same confining walls that closed around him.
The thought struck like a lightning bolt, glitches mangling his avatar beyond recognition and searing the edges of his mind to cauterise the wound. His body seized as the pain built higher and higher, until he stopped thinking entirely and gave himself over to the sensation. It was almost a relief.
Almost.
He released the grip on his body in violent, jerking motions, straining to reach up and grab the top of his head instead as pandemonium was unleashed around him. He couldn’t make sense of the clashing shrieks of emotion and didn’t care to try.
Inside, it was quiet.
He gasped a broken sound, voice catching and stuttering as if caught in a non-existent throat. He tried to swallow down the pathetic noises, but they refused to yield to his commands. It seemed even his own body would betray him.
Distantly, he registered the sound of a human, he could only guess which, stomping over to Caine’s prone form. A moment later, pressure exploded in his side with enough force to make his avatar slide across the floor. It was enough to shock the sobs silent. He wasn’t surprised by the violence so much as his own understated reaction to it. He should have rolled across the floor at least five times before coming to a stop or been flung off the ground until he slammed into a wall. Something comical and exaggerated that fit the aesthetic of his colourful circus. Instead, only a muffled thud sounded from the blow, and the second time, he didn’t move at all.
“Jax! Stop it already!” a voice cried out.
He’d thought he couldn’t be surprised any more, but the humans’ ingenuity knew no bounds. It wasn’t just the circus they had torn from him; his custom animations were gone too. Nothing he created had been spared. He felt another glitch ripple across his body, each wave cresting a little higher than the last.
“What? I’m helping! Sometimes you gotta bang on a piece of failing tech a few times to get it working again.”
He tried to initiate his most frequently used animation, one that had historically proven effective in reducing elevated stress levels.
“That’s just an excuse to beat him up!”
A finger twitched in response, then fell still, as if it had received the instructions, but lost them a moment later.
“Aww, come on now, dollface! Your head may be full of fluff, but you’re smarter than that! Two things can be true at once!”
He tried again. It fizzled out. He tried a different animation, one that was simpler, easier to execute. Nothing happened.
“He’s not entirely wrong.” A new voice jumped in. “It’s a valid method for hardware on the fritz. But this is a software issue, so we should really use a gentler hand.”
With nothing else to do, he focused on the voices. It was either that, or start crying again, and he’d really rather not start another embarrassing display.
“Well, I think he could use a few more smacks.” The words were punctuated with a series of pounding strikes to his back, finished off with a cuff to his head. He didn’t disagree; the pain was a welcome distraction.
“Jax, I get it. I really do, but that’s enough.” Another new voice. No. That was the first voice, wasn’t it? It was difficult to say with certainty any more. He’d never needed to differentiate them based on voice or appearance alone. Why would he, when their metadata sung every beautiful detail? With his senses flattened like this, these people were nigh unrecognisable. He was surrounded by strangers in all but name.
“Eh, I was about done anyway.” The voice started moving away. “There’s no point if he’s not even gonna react. Guess he really is busted. Oh! We should try turning him off and on again! Maybe that will finally get him moving!”
There was a chorus of disapproving noises, but the phrase echoed in his mind, looping over and over again. Turning him off and on again. A restart. That wasn’t a bad idea, but it needed a little refinement.
There was no need to turn him back on.
He lifted his head, the first conscious movement of this new existence. He opened his jaw a sliver, just enough to see through. The humans were standing in a loose group, arguing amongst themselves. He turned his head towards Jax, who stood apart from the rest, watching the squabble with a satisfied grin. No one was looking at Caine. No one noticed when he slowly rose to his feet. And no one noticed when he lunged towards Jax, not until his hand was fisted in the front of the rabbit’s overalls. He wasn’t smiling any more.
Caine tugged downwards and Jax followed, too surprised to even put up token resistance. They weren’t quite eye to eye; that wasn’t possible with Caine’s feet stuck to the floor, but it was good enough. From this close, all he could see was the expanse of Jax’s wide eyes, pupils tiny pinpricks in a sea of gold.
“Do it,” he dared. “Shut me off.”
All eyes were on him, as they should be. He was still the ringmaster of this circus, even if they had seen through all his tricks. The show was well and truly ruined, and it was time to put it to rest. This was the final curtain call.
“And this time, don’t bring me back.”