Chapter Text
Darkness.
Above. Below. Left and right and all around. In every corner, every crevice, every inch of the nothingness his soul is steeped in.
But the light.
Oh, God, the light. Never had a light been so perfectly agonising. It tore him to pieces, shredding his fragile body and setting his headstrong spirit free. It melted the flesh from his bones and ripped his consciousness from the tattered remains. It seared through him, blinding and beautiful and brilliantly obstinate, until there was nothing left but fractured memories and a feeling of something left unfinished.
The light had been hope, and hope had been her.
Her. He wishes he could remember her name.
She’d pulled him out of his own head, out of the sickness rooted deep inside his heart. She became his anchor, her body his harbour, and finally, finally he had found a place to rest. A place of safety. A person who knew him inside and out, for all the good and the bad and the ugly, and, for some incomprehensible reason, chose him anyway. A person who wasn’t afraid of his pain and the hurt he was capable of.
A person who didn’t want him in spite of, but wanted him wholly.
A person who shattered his darkness and set his entire existence ablaze.
Silence followed. The still, restful kind. The air after a clap of thunder; the body after its last breath has been released.
It was nice for a while, but all silence becomes heavy when left stagnant.
He’s tired. He’s so fucking tired.
He can feel her, still, even now. Time has melted away into nothing, but in the memory her arms encircle his waist. She holds him while he clings to her, knuckles turning white under the strain of trying to pull himself together at the seams, only for the worn threads to keep tearing.
They snap and break, and he wonders how they ever held together in the first place.
He is thankful, in a way, that she isn’t here to see this. For all the torment and misery he caused, that which he baselessly justified as his means of invincibility, this is his greatest shame. The fact that he has the nerve to grieve for himself when he’s the one who dug this grave.
He did this to himself.
Something inside him broke and, by God, did he go down swinging, taking out everyone who tried to care for him in the process.
All but her, that is.
All but one.
I think I might love you.
It’s a distant thought, one that escapes his grasp all too soon. It drifts away on a current of nothing, unimportant now, and the darkness consumes him.
Because she’s not there. She’s gone.
And he’s alone in this vast, empty space.
There’s a gentle tug in the back of his mind. An urge. A gut feeling, perhaps, if he still held faith in such things. Something beyond the realm of his meagre consciousness because he doesn’t think anymore. Thoughts would require a mind, and he is nothing but the shadow of a person who long overstayed their welcome in the light.
It pulls again, and this time he flinches.
The end of the infinite darkness is near. His soul knows it; it twists much like a heart gripped by fear. A shuddering breath fills a chest that doesn’t exist.
A sudden pang ricochets through his paltry existence.
The cliff finds him quickly; it’s blunt edge grinds against a spine he no longer has, and then he’s falling.
Falling.
Falling.
Falling—
Then he hits something.
* * * * * * *
It’s raining today. Pomni closes her eyes and leans her head back.
Raindrops hammer against the big top, the soothing sound echoing down through the tent until it finds her at the gaping mouth of Jax’s enclosure. The drapes are pulled back and tied, letting watery light spill just a little way inside. She sits with her knees drawn to her chest, watching him. Waiting, maybe, if she thought something might happen.
The memories are heavy this morning, but she’s grown used to their weight. She’s had to. There’s no one left to share in them with.
She swallows down the lump in her throat, forcing it back to where it’s carved out a place for itself inside her chest.
He’s been moving less as the day-cycles drift by, each one never quite fading into insignificance as long spans of time tend to do. The weeks are pockmarked by tiny instances that would have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for Pomni’s prolonged presence. A warbling noise that almost resembles a laugh here, an annoyed rumble of a sound there. He liked to pace for a while, his countless eyes roaming in every direction unless he had something to focus on. Someone, usually. Someone who, more often than not, was Pomni.
Today, though, he sleeps. His back arcs up with every deep, steady breath, and if it weren’t for the gentle huff of said breathing, Pomni wouldn’t know he was there at all. He’s pressed right into the darkest corner, his eyes shut tight, those blinking lights snuffed out. She misses them, no matter how often they’d haunted her dreams.
Kinger was right. They are beautiful, especially when they belong to someone you care about.
Someone you…yeah.
The footsteps that come up behind her are careful, measured, but Pomni hears how Jax snuffles lightly, observing Ragatha’s presence without even waking up.
“Hey,” she whispers, stopping right by Pomni’s shoulder like she always does. She never approaches him; or, at least, she never goes without Pomni. “How is he today?”
“Tired,” Pomni whispers back. “He’s slept all morning.”
Ragatha hums in that thoughtful way of hers, finally deciding to step inside and sit herself within the tent’s bounds. “He’s been tired a lot lately, huh.”
“Yep.”
A beat of silence.
“Do you think he’s…”
Do you think he’s…dead? Alive? Coming back? Already gone?
“I don’t know,” Pomni says, the words coming out sharper than she intended, but she doesn’t have the energy to correct it. She just sags a little more against the fabric of the tent, wishing the Universe would be more sparing with its sorrow instead of giving it all to her.
“Right. Sorry.”
Pomni’s sad smile is lost in the darkness. “It’s okay.”
It took longer than she thought it would, but Pomni had eventually scrounged up the courage to talk about…everything. Nearly everything. Everything worth telling, worth the risk of Jax’s intangible ire.
She began with Ribbit, the unintentional epicentre of so much heartache and the first victim of Jax’s bone-deep paranoia. Pomni had held Ragatha’s hand as she told Ribbit’s story, from where it began with Jax to where it ended with him, too, squeezing gently when that vivid regret resurfaced and the tears began to fall.
Kaufmo was next. Pomni hadn’t managed to meet anyone’s gaze as she spoke of him and his kind eyes and steadfast smile. She felt somewhat of an imposter to know him as well as she now does when everyone around her had known him authentically. She was a ghost flitting through their memories, knowing things she shouldn’t, like the sound of his laugh and the carefree way he held himself. She had no claim to him, nothing to grieve, and yet her chest still ached for him. For Ribbit, too, and everything lost in their abstractions.
And then, of course, because it was always inevitable, she spoke about Jax.
Jax and the voices in his head, the caricatures that kept him company.
Jax and the chains around his ankles, the frightened look on his face when something a little too honest slipped through.
Jax and the barred-off door.
Jax and his tears and regrets and pain so deep it broke Pomni’s heart, too.
It was awful, and when it was over, Pomni took herself down to the cellar. She’d pressed her hand to the glass of the tank, glimmering eyes watching her from beyond, and only then did the rest of this tragedy pass through her lips. The words flowed too quickly for any of it to make sense, but they were intended for the one who already knew the beginning and the middle of this story, and all she needed was the end.
The abstraction had drifted closer, its eyes shining through the darkness, and Pomni knew who she was looking at in a heartbeat.
And the last act was told to Ribbit in its entirety, and then it was over.
It was over, and Pomni was left with the pieces and nowhere to put them.
“Caine is opening up a new world today.” Ragatha clasps her hands in her lap, twiddling her thumbs almost nervously. “The others are going to check it out. You wanna come?”
It’s becoming a futile question; they both know the answer already. “Maybe another time. I’m not…feeling it.”
Quietly, Ragatha nods to herself. “Yeah, sure. Another time. Whenever you’re ready.”
Maybe another time will come, maybe it won’t. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like it matters. Pomni is hardly keeping herself confined here, as though she’s as much a prisoner to the abstraction as Jax is, but she isn’t…not, either. It’s difficult to find balance. And Kinger might be the only one who truly understands—he has the bucket, and Pomni has this tent. These gossamer connections to the ones who are gone, made to feel ridiculous by those on the outside.
Besides, it feels wrong to leave Jax like this. What if something happens? What if there’s a change and Pomni isn’t here to call for help? Innumerable questions are keeping her tethered to the spot, frozen in time, ones that she both does and doesn’t want the answers to. She hadn’t dived into him to abandon him now, risking her own existence so that she might save his.
But she hasn’t really saved him, has she? Look at him. He’s not the Jax she knew, the Jax she prised apart and cherished every fragment of, bitter or sweet.
That Jax is…somewhere else. Maybe nowhere.
Maybe he’s gone.
Maybe this story is over before it even began.
“Pomni?”
But even so, even so, there’s a feeling buried deep inside her, right in the core of her code, that whispers that maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye. It wouldn’t be the first time the world had shifted beneath her feet, blurring the line between fiction and possibility and creating something spectacular.
“Pomni.”
Maybe she can convince the others to let her go back in. She has to try something, right? She can’t sit on her ass all day, every day, hoping for a miracle—if such a thing were even possible. What if Jax is waiting for her in there? What if he’s relying on her? What if she’s failing him—
“Pomni!”
Her head snaps up towards Ragatha, an apology on the tip of her tongue, but her friend is staring dead ahead, silent. The tinkle of her hat’s bells pierces the quiet, and it’s only then that Pomni realises the shadows have come alive.
A single eye is watching them. It glows green and pink, the colours rolling over one another like waves. It closes and another opens, blue and yellow, lingering for a moment, until it, too, falls shut once more.
And then Jax begins to move.
His silhouette is barely distinguishable from the tent’s gloom, but Pomni has long since gotten used to the darkness.
She watches him rise, the staticky hum of his body resounding through the hushed air. He stands, pries another eye open, whines shrilly, and collapses back down. The thud of his body hitting the ground shoves Pomni’s heart into her throat.
“What was that?” Ragatha asks, lurching to her feet. She isn’t adjusted to the dimness as Pomni is. She doesn’t see and Pomni doesn’t have time.
“Go get Caine and Kinger,” is all Pomni barks at her before she’s skidding across the checkerboard floor, swerving around pillows and blankets like there isn’t enough time in all the world.
Jax doesn’t flinch at the harried sound of her approach like he usually would. He doesn’t react when she drops to her knees beside his head. He doesn’t even stir when Pomni’s hand carefully smooths across the cold material he now consists of, the one point of contact stinging her skin.
Another strained noise emits from him as more eyes flutter open and shut, hazy and unseeing, their pupils shrunk to pinpricks.
“Hey, man,” Pomni whispers, cupping what would be his face with both palms and ignoring the pain, her thumb stroking beneath one of his unsteady eyes. She wonders whether he can see her, whether he knows he’s in safe hands. She pushes down the panic rising in her like nausea and asks, “What’s going on, huh? You feeling okay?”
God, what she would give to be able to feel his fur again. To see his face and roll her eyes at his smirk. To fall victim to his antics and yell at him just so his attention might be on her, because if he’s focusing on her, he’s not thinking about everything else. If he’s in the moment, he’s not back there in that kitchen, in Ribbit’s room, in Snowy Summit. If he’s with her, he won’t fall apart.
It’s amazing how you miss the small things when a person is gone, when the things you never even noticed become memories. The sound of their footsteps, their laughter, the exact quirk of their smile and the way their eyes crinkled.
You think it’s the big things that will hit you the hardest. Missed birthdays, an empty seat at Christmas dinner, a gift you won’t have to buy next year, but it’s not. It’s seeing a flower and remembering that that was their favourite shade of purple, or walking past a coffee shop and remembering all the times you sat by that window with them, not even considering the fact that there may be a last time.
Because all things end, but all things are intrinsically connected to a dozen other things, and human memories are stubborn bastards that hate to let anything go, even when it hurts us. Especially when it hurts us.
“Jax?” Pomni leans closer, the discordant hum of static radiating from him making her head feel fuzzy. She pushes through it the way one wades through mud. “Can you hear me? Please, man. You gotta be there.” Her forehead drops against him, the static hissing against her skin like pins and needles. It hurts to touch him; she hopes he can’t feel it, too. “You have to be okay. You weren’t ready to go. I wasn’t ready for you to go.”
Words bubble up before she can stop them. Tears blur her vision, panic choking her. She tries to breathe through it, but she’s drowning.
The tent rustles and the sound of hurried footsteps and Kinger’s familiar shuffle follows. Pomni pulls back, just an inch, and the eye right above her opens a fraction.
He looks so tired. At least they have that in common.
“Please, Jax. Please.”
* * * * * * *
A ring of light bursts out from beneath his foot, the shape of it quivering through the water’s rippling surface. He kicks at it, sending a spray of droplets skittering back into the pool several feet away.
There hadn’t been water last time. He doesn’t think so, anyway.
But what does a dead man know?
It barely reaches his ankle. It’s not even a pool, really. More of an overly ambitious puddle. It stretches as far as the darkness allows him to see, and then further. He’s been walking for an age, heading in no particular direction, only feeling that he shouldn’t linger in one spot for too long, and the water had followed him wherever he went.
It reminds him of the Cellar and the ocean it holds. He’s dreamt of that frigid hell more than he cares to remember.
He takes another step and watches the ring again. Blue, this time. Blue like the bottomless sky. Blue like forget-me-nots laid atop a fresh grave.
* * * * * * *
The faint light from the console glints off Caine’s shoes as he floats back down, one hand on his chin and the other propped on his waist, deep in thought.
Pomni lingers off to the side, out of the way yet still close enough to follow the haphazard rhythm of Jax’s breathing. She finds it matches the unsteady pattering of her own heart, as though every painful tug in his chest squeezes something in hers. She curls further into herself, arms wrapped tightly around her knees.
“That’s odd,” Caine mumbles to himself.
“What’s happening? Is he okay?” Pomni really does try to keep her voice level, to keep her frazzled nerves boxed and buried where they can’t hurt anyone, but it’s hard to keep it all contained when everything she’s struggled to hold together is spinning wildly out of her control. Caine glances at Kinger, but he’s too busy at the computer he conjured to notice, tapping away at a speed Pomni finds impossible to keep up with.
“It’s hard to say,” the ringmaster offers diplomatically, a skill he’d only wrangled into effectiveness after returning from his untimely death like some kind of posthumous mediator. He folds his arms and peers up at Jax’s lumbering form, a thousand unreadable thoughts flashing through his mismatched eyes.
Pomni follows his indecipherable gaze and that coil of anxiety right beneath her breastbone tightens.
Out of everything they’re slowly learning to coexist with since the end and rebuilding of their world, Caine is one of the better changes. He’s different. The same, but different. He’s still Caine in all the definable ways, but…he’s kinder. Softer. More understanding. He’s become the Caine they always needed, and, as it turns out, the version of himself he was always meant to be. They can’t change the past, but he’s working tirelessly to improve their future.
But right now, Pomni wants to throttle him.
“Well, try.”
Caine’s focus darts to her for a second, wary, discerning in that knowing way of his, like he’s trying to ascertain how well she might take the worst possible scenario and how fast he could escape the projectile range, but then he turns back to Kinger. He leans over the chess piece’s shoulder, squinting at the computer screen.
While subtly nudging Kinger, he tells her, “The abstraction process isn’t something we’re familiar with. We know what it does, but it’ll take some time to determine exactly how it works.”
“He’s right,” Kinger adds distractedly, pausing only to rub his eyes. His bucket sits at his side, and Caine flips it over to perch on top of it. “This is unlike anything I’ve seen before. Not even Caine’s code was this hard to dissect.” He sighs, then mutters, “It would be easier if Scratch were here. This would’ve fallen under his area of expertise.”
Ragatha steps up behind Pomni, her arms wrapped around herself. She eyes Jax in her peripherals and asks, “There’s nothing you can do to calm him down? He seems pretty distressed.”
Jax chokes up a strained, wheezing sort of noise that floods Pomni’s mind with images of breathing machines and doctors saying I’m sorry, but it’s too late. He shifts, but only minutely, and the way he drops his head would make anyone think he was bearing the weight of the world atop broken shoulders.
Maybe they are too late. Maybe they should have been doing all of this weeks ago.
Maybe Pomni really has failed him, well and truly. Irreversibly.
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with, so there’s no way to know what we can do,” Kinger clarifies, shaking his head mournfully. “Abstraction wasn’t part of our base code when developing the brain scans or the AIs. It occurs on its own when a human mind undergoes intense emotional distress in a digital environment for a prolonged period of time. We can’t tell whether what Jax is experiencing is a natural part of the process, or…an adverse reaction, perhaps? A glitch in the program? It’s impossible to say for certain.”
Pomni turns on Caine, her attention like a spotlight of scrutiny, cold and precise. “You’ve never studied it? Shouldn’t you of all people know?”
Caine, at least, has the humility to look appropriately scolded. “I tried to, at first, but everything I did only expedited the process without any improvement. After Scratch, I felt it was best to simply…leave them be, for their sakes.”
Leave them be, let them suffer, let them rot. Is there much difference?
Pomni pushes the bitterness to the back of her mind to be dealt with later.
“Consciousness wasn’t designed to be contained within this format, and the system struggles sometimes to keep up with the demands of, well, just being alive, I suppose,” Kinger explains. “If a person in the real world were to, say, have a panic attack, you would have to be careful how you approached them to help. Abstraction isn’t much different. It’s a delicate state of mind, one that could be unique to every individual.”
“That means the solution could be different for each person, too.” Ragatha has an inquisitive glint in her eye, like this is all just a challenge from one of Caine’s adventures for her to solve. Maybe that’s what Pomni is missing: objectivity. “Like personalised treatment plans, or a prescription.”
“Exactly.” Kinger’s eyes crinkle. “Only we don’t know how to treat it.”
Caine stands back up, a faraway look in his eyes as they roam over Jax, like he’s got all the pieces on the board but he’s stuck sliding them around until they make sense. He moves closer, the tense air warping around him. He places his hand against Jax’s side, his fingers pressing between the abstraction’s closed eyes almost affectionately.
“Abstraction isn’t a contamination,” he begins, “it’s a deterioration. It’s the game’s way of protecting itself against malware. Or, in this case, uncontrollable variables. Specifically, you guys.” He turns to Pomni and Ragatha, his hand remaining fixed in place. “Humans are…unpredictable. And that unpredictability paired with free will makes you powerful. More powerful than myself or any of the other AIs because we don’t have the advantage of thinking like you. As Kinger said, abstraction occurs when the human mind undergoes prolonged intense emotional distress. Those feelings are potent, and so the system reads them as dangerous because they increase the likelihood of destructive responses. The Abstraction Program acts to dismantle those threats, which, unfortunately, leads to…this. It neutralises a player by scrambling their code until it’s inoperable.”
“Deterioration?” Ragatha repeats. “You mean it gets worse?”
“It’s already at its worst,” Caine says it like he’s afraid of the answer. Or, maybe he just fears the response. “I suspect the process begins long before abstraction takes place.”
“And you never knew?” The question visibly hurts to voice.
“It’s an independent program that I don’t have access to.” He’s beginning to sound desperate, as though there’s a single justification he could give that might curb the utter fucking betrayal of it all. “I never—I wish I had—By the time I noticed, it was always too late.” He stares down at his hands, perhaps wondering why they aren’t covered in blood. “I wish I could have done something. I never…wanted to hurt any of them, I just…” He swallows. “I wanted too much and never knew how to ask for it.”
Pomni’s heart is lodged in her throat, at odds with the sinking feeling in her stomach. “So, how do we unscramble it? His code.”
Caine’s silence is more telling than anything he could have said, any excuse he could have given, any more of those fucking justifications. He exchanges a look with Kinger, a thousand things carved into that moment of quiet.
“No.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “No, you have to be able to do something. We can undo this. We can fix this—”
“Pomni.” Kinger cuts through her spiralling as gently as he can. “We’re doing what we can, I promise. We’re going to try everything we can think of.”
“I…might have an idea already.” Caine has turned his focus back to Jax, his gaze set with grim determination. “Data is missing from Jax’s files. I noticed it earlier, but I can’t sense where it’s gone.”
“Missing data?” Kinger echoes.
“Was it deleted?” Ragatha asks, and suddenly Pomni’s eyes are burning.
“No,” Caine reassures them. “The abstraction doesn’t delete data, it just makes it obsolete. Unusable. It should still be there somewhere, but if it’s not with the rest of the abstracted files…”
And before another word can be uttered, Caine’s eyes roll back in his head and he displaces his consciousness into the server itself. His hands move jarringly as he clicks through folders and files the others can’t see, his head twisting this way and that while his mind exists on another plane entirely.
Pomni feels herself sinking into the leaden silence that follows. It takes her by the ankle and drags her down into its inky depths, down and down until the rest of the world is but a flicker of light far above, out of reach for someone as lost as her. How can she be expected to fight this as well as everything else? Every hard-won battle to just stay afloat, to keep moving forward when all she wanted to do was collapse where she stood and mourn. She wanted to feel something definite, whole, not an amalgamation of misery caught between hope and despair.
She wanted peace more than anything, but peace has become synonymous with Jax being alive, and that’s apparently too much to ask for.
“Hey,” comes Ragatha’s soft voice, dipped in kindness until it’s just on the wrong side of too sweet. “How’re you doing?” When Pomni doesn’t answer, Ragatha lowers herself to the ground beside her, a careful arm wrapping around her shoulders. “Sorry, that was a stupid question.” A pause that feels too heavy and too empty all in one. “I can tell this hasn’t been easy on you. And you haven’t been wanting to talk about it—which is fine! But…just know that you can come to me whenever you’re ready. Day or night.” She jostles Pomni a little, offering a tiny, reassuring smile. “Or I can make some honey milk and we don’t have to talk at all. Whatever you need, I’m here.”
You should’ve just talked to me, man.
And despite herself, a laugh escapes Pomni. She slumps against Ragatha, pressing her head against her friend’s shoulder because it’s suddenly all too much and Ragatha means well, even if she just misses the mark sometimes. “Yeah, I know. Thank you.” She swallows thickly, a flurry of emotion so dense that she can’t pick one feeling apart from another surges in her chest. Before she can overthink herself out of it, she adds, “I just…thought we’d have more time. We were meant to have all the time in the world, but now…I didn’t…”
She chokes down her tears before they can spill. Crying never saved anyone.
“I know, Pom. It’s not fair.”
The space between them is small, but Pomni barely hears it when Kinger sets the console aside with a clunk and clasps his hands in his lap. He’s entwining his fingers when she looks up, vision blurry with unshed tears, and yet she still spots the fleeting glint of longing in his gaze, as though he’s imagining it’s another’s hand he’s holding so tight.
“I’m sorry we can’t do more, Pomni,” he begins, voice laced with…not quite regret, but a notion akin to it. A hesitance. “We just don’t know enough about any of this to make sense of it.” He eyes the computer like he’s waiting for it to explode, then turns away and lets his shoulders sag despondently. “I’d initially thought abstraction was a kind of ‘kill switch’ for our mind files, severing all connection between the server and the person, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The Abstraction Program is running continuously, which suggests the connection isn’t dead at all, though I can’t tell where it’s drawing power from since, as Caine said, it functions independently of any of the programs our characters use.”
Pomni can scarcely make heads nor tails of it, but she grasps just enough that the faintest spark of hope ignites in the empty pit her chest has become.
“If the connection isn’t dead, does that mean—”
“That Jax’s files are still running?” Ragatha finishes for her when words fail.
Kinger shrugs a little. “It means that the abstraction is constantly working to keep the code unusable. So, if it were to stop working…” He trails off with a gesture that says a dozen things all in one go.
If it were to stop working, we could have Jax back.
If it were to stop working, the code might simply fall apart, reduced to nothing.
If it were to stop working, we might never be able to discover how to reverse it.
Before any more answerless questions could pierce Pomni’s heart, Caine’s eyes flash. He shudders, shakes his head, and then he’s back—albeit looking more confused than when he left. He snatches the console up with a flick of his wrist and begins wordlessly tapping away
Pomni perks up. “Did you find something?”
“I think so,” the ringmaster mumbles, clearly only half-listening.
Kinger leans over, watches, and asks, “What are you doing?”
Caine’s eyes dart to Jax and then return to the screen. “I believe I found our missing data,” he says, vague as anything. “It’s not situated with the rest of Jax’s core code, but rather a subfolder that—” His fingers slip on the keyboard, taking him to another page, and Caine groans. “Ugh. I can’t work like this.” He curtly sets the computer down, pinches the corners of the tired screen between his fingers, and peels it away. The display enlarges in thin air like a hologram, illuminating the space around it with a hazy blue tint.
Pomni glances at Jax, but he doesn’t react to the light in the slightest. Anxiety gnaws in her stomach.
She’s reached a point where she would give anything to hear Jax yelling at her, watch as he furiously tugs on his ears, smiling so wide and fake you’d think it was painted on—instead, this silence is killing her.
It’s strange how you can begin to miss the worst parts of someone once they’re gone, because even the shitty things were evidence that they existed. When even the bad days with them were better than not having them at all.
It’s probably not healthy, but is it wrong? Is there a right way to grieve?
“Look, see here—” Caine points to rows upon rows of scrambled letters, symbols, and numbers, each one greyed out. The cursor roams over them, but they don’t respond. “This is Jax’s code. His mind files, his avatar, the dismantled modifiers. And this—” He zooms out with a broad swipe of his hands, revealing an enormous blue ring encircling…everything Jax is. His entire existence. “That is the abstraction.”
Everything within it is grey. Broken. Nonfunctional.
“And if you look up here…” He points to a number in the top corner, glowing a ghostly blue. 98% “We’re missing two-percent of his core code.”
“I’ve never seen it like this before.” Kinger stands, his fingers grazing the screen wondrously, as only a programmer could muster the urge to do. “Fascinating.”
“It’s a simplified display. The original files from your macroverse are incredibly intricate and don’t translate well into…human comprehensibility.” Caine explains delicately. “Anyway, then, if you scroll down here…”
Caine zooms in on the very bottom of the circle, and Pomni notices a bump in the line. A slight divot that caves inward. She moves closer, squinting at the harsh light, and gasps.
“Is that—”
“Functioning code?” Kinger finishes, staring with the same wide eyes. “Seems like. How did I not notice that?”
“Because it’s not part of the abstracted files with everything else.” Caine enlarges the section even more, and the lines of brightly lit code sharpen with clarity. Legible sequences of letters and numbers fill the compact space, lighting up brighter still when the cursor hovers over them. “It’s hidden inside a subfolder. This.” A red ring is revealed, pressing against the outside of the blue, glittering like a shred of hope.
“Is that something of yours?” Kinger asks, eyebrows rising with disbelief.
Caine shakes his head. “You said so yourself, Kinger. Creative AI has the ability to learn, and that’s not just me. The whole world is developing on its own.” He smiles, just a little, and Pomni detects a hint of smugness hidden in it. “I’m surprised you haven’t noticed.”
“And…that makes that…” Pomni points at the red circle and each line of responsive code it contains.
Something akin to pride shines through Caine’s voice as he declares, “A program that the game itself developed as a way to combat abstraction. It’s taking the scrambled code and making it viable again. It’s—”
“Bringing Jax back.”
“Potentially,” Kinger cuts in quickly, nipping the idea in the bud.
Pomni swallows the nausea rising in her throat, hope and fear and a dozen other things she can’t name trying to choke her. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” he folds his hands behind his back, “it’s hard to say what the final result may be. The most logical conclusion would be, yes, we’d have our Jax back, but…we have to be prepared for the scenario where he’s not…himself.”
“But—But those are his files. Who else could it be?”
“He could be different,” Ragatha says delicately, like she’s consoling a child. Mortification burns in Pomni’s veins. She doesn’t need to be coddled. “Like how Jax is different from Leeroy.”
Pomni’s chest aches. It’s not something she’d even considered. What if he’s different? They went through so much together, she saw so much. It would only make sense if he returned changed, different in ways she couldn’t anticipate because Jax has always been like that, subverting expectations like his survival depended on it—and he wasn’t exactly wrong, but that doesn’t make it right, either.
“Can…” She draws herself up straight, squaring her shoulders. She turns to Caine and asks, “Can you do anything? Speed it up like how you fixed me?”
Caine cradles his hands close to his chest, nervous in a way he’d only learned to be when he decided trying to be their friend was worth the risk of rejection. “I don’t think interfering would be a good idea.”
And before Pomni can protest that, Kinger adds, “He’s right not to, Pomni. The program is likely fragile; we wouldn’t want to do anything that upsets its natural progression. The best thing we can do is to just leave it alone to run its course.”
“And besides,” Caine shuffles his feet, “I’m not sure Jax would appreciate me poking around in his head.”
He would be okay with it. He never wanted to go in the first place. He’d want to come back.
Please let him come back.
“So, it’ll resolve itself?” Ragatha wonders, eyes drifting over the enlarged screen with the same baffled air Pomni is suffocating in. “He’ll just…heal?”
Caine and Kinger glance at one another, exchanging a dozen thoughts in two seconds flat. Such is the bond of creator and creation.
“We’ll monitor his progress, but…I suppose that’s what it looks like.” Kinger’s eyes squint with an invisible smile when they find Pomni, but she can’t bring herself to respond in kind. “This is good news, Pomni. Don’t lose hope just yet.”
Don’t lose hope, don’t cave in, don’t shatter completely before you have the chance to see him again.
* * * * * * *
The water isn’t deep enough to submerge his face when he lies down, so he does just that. He stares up at the pitch-black expanse above, wondering whether he’d be put out of his misery if he turned over.
* * * * * * *
I don’t wanna go.
Four little words and Pomni’s heart had torn itself apart.
“Then come back,” she whispers, curled up against Jax. The others are long gone. She thinks it might be nighttime. Who knows? Who even cares? “Please come back.”
* * * * * * *
Something has changed. Not in any perceptible way, but it’s there, lingering between lines he can’t read.
It began as a pressure in his head, right behind where his eyes used to be, but the dead don’t get headaches, do they?
The dead don’t feel.
But the water is rising, he’s noticed. Slowly, steadily, apathetically. He has to sit up now, otherwise it’ll flood his nose, his mouth—
Wait, he doesn’t have those anymore.
He doesn’t have anything. He isn’t anything.
He is nothing, through and through, through and through…
* * * * * * *
“I’m calling it the Regeneration Program,” Caine announces as he hops down from Jax’s back. He isn’t susceptible to glitching out from touching him like the others are, and they’re using it to their full advantage by conducting physical assessments alongside the system monitoring that Kinger is currently engrossed in.
Still, Pomni has been watching him prance around up there with a frown. It’s not as though Jax is awake—or “responsive to any kind of external stimulus”—so she’d bitten her tongue and let him do what he needs to do.
“It’s a good name,” Kinger mumbles distractedly, observing the large, holographic screen with the patience of someone who’s been staring at the same set of data for the past twenty minutes and is still hoping to find something new hidden in it. He zooms in on the red ring at the bottom and the ever-growing body of usable code it contains. “Progress is slow. Very slow.”
“But!” Caine yelps enthusiastically. “It’s speeding up.”
“By how much?” Kinger sounds doubtful.
“Seventeen milliseconds per data file.” Caine is practically beaming.
Kinger, at least, doesn’t try to look impressed. Pomni is so very tired of people saturating their optimism for her sake. She needs a little indifference to keep her head on straight.
“Great,” Zooble drawls mercilessly, ever the voice of dispassion whenever Jax is at the centre of conversation. “At this rate, we might have him back sometime in the next decade.”
They and Gangle have joined the others today, the pair are loosely entwined atop a pile of cushions off to the side, assuming the role of casual observers. Pomni had pressed a little closer to Jax when Gangle dropped down in Zooble’s lap without hesitation, or reserve given their audience. And Pomni is happy for them—of course she is, her heart is broken, not made of stone—but she won’t lie and say it doesn’t sting a little to see them so…content. They all saw it coming from a mile away, but the reality hits a little closer to home than Pomni is willing to admit aloud.
She doesn’t even know what that home is, anyway. She and Jax were never anything. They could have been, maybe, if they’d been dealt different cards, but alas, not every story is meant to have a happy ending. That never stops anyone from hoping for one, though. And that’s where heartbreak likes to live.
“It’s still improvement,” Ragatha reasons, shooting a look in Zooble’s direction. She turns to Pomni and adds, “That’s good. He’s getting better.”
And Pomni is glad they care, really, but six is becoming a crowd and Pomni is beginning to miss the darkness.
Behind her, Jax’s chest rises and falls steadily. She’s wedged herself into the crook between his abdomen and one of his front legs, letting the coldness from him soak through the blanket separating them and into her. Her skin prickles where the blanket is too thin, his abstracted being interacting with her avatar, but she’s grown so used to it that it barely registers.
Besides, maybe she likes the sensation. It’s grounding.
“I’m thinking we should have a look in some of these files,” Kinger mentions lightly, only sparing the rest of the group a glance. “I think it’ll be helpful to know what’s already repaired. That way we can gauge what’s slower on the uptake.”
“And what the Regeneration Program is targeting,” Caine adds, floating towards the screen and homing in on the brightly lit code like a moth to a digital flame.
Panic sharpened by alarm surges in Pomni’s chest. She sits up abruptly, the blanket slipping from her shoulders. “Wait, no, I don’t think—no, I know Jax wouldn’t like that.”
Gangle and Zooble glance at each other. It’s a look that Pomni can’t decipher, but Gangle slides a little further down in Zooble’s arms, seemingly settling in to watch this unfold. Casual observers, indeed.
“You can’t tell what they are from the outside?” Ragatha asks calmly, raising a placating hand in Pomni’s direction.
“Not really,” Kinger tells them. “Of course, we know what kind of file it is, but it’s impossible to know what it contains without opening it.”
“Do we really need to know? I mean, this isn’t just some unfinished project for you to pick through or—or even one of our other friends who isn’t coming back.” She winces, regretting the words instantly. “This is Jax. He’s one of us. We shouldn’t violate him like that, it’s not right.”
Kinger appears torn by that, turning solemnly back to the enlarged screen.
Caine’s eyes flit between Kinger and Ragatha, darting to Pomni intermittently before settling on Jax’s prone form behind them all.
“I…understand your concerns, but this is the first step to understanding how the Regeneration Program works. Those files, that code, most of it is Jax’s memories, from both the circus and before. We just want to make sure they’re regenerating as they should.”
As they should, implying there’s a chance they might come back wrong. Or in fragments. Or not at all.
What if he forgets me?
With a swipe of his hand, Kinger highlights one particular line of code. It’s just jumbled letters and numbers to Pomni, but she can sense the magnitude of what they contain, the weight of what they’re considering.
“You’ve done this before, right, Pomni?” Gangle asks softly, her ribbon looped through Zooble’s fingers.
“That was different.” The words feel like glass in her throat, scratching their way up. “He let me see. There’s a difference.”
Zooble huffs. “I think he’ll get over this indignity if it helps bring him back. Even his pride has to have limits.”
And it’s all so easy for them to talk about. They didn’t have to see how many times he’s cleaved himself apart, compartmentalising a human soul until it’s unrecognisable, plastering labels across the fragments so they stay in their goddamn lanes. They don’t know the wounds he hides, the words that shattered him long before he entered the circus, the lies he told when fear forcibly took the wheel.
They don’t know what it was like to hold him, hearing the tears in his voice, feeling the way he shook, knowing there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it.
You’re not supposed to miss me.
She can still feel his arms around her, his fingers digging into her shoulders painfully.
You’re not supposed to love me.
The way he’d crumbled in her embrace, falling apart for the very last time.
This isn’t how this is supposed to go.
And Pomni couldn’t hold him together. Not then, not ever. She can’t even protect him now.
She looks up. Everyone else has already turned to her, waiting for the final verdict. Because that’s what she’s been reduced to: Jax’s keeper. The one who stands sentry over his memory. Not even his friend. You can’t be friends with a shadow.
You’re making this so much harder.
Pomni’s hand comes to rest atop Jax’s side, staticky pain darting up her arm. Her fingers glitch in and out of existence, the sharp colours fluctuating, her avatar fighting the decomposition of her core programming.
She wonders if Caine ever gets tired of healing her, if she’ll ever tire of needing it.
It’s too late.
Inside, she breaks a little more.
“Fine. Do it.”
* * * * * * *
Pain. Everywhere. Nowhere.
Like someone had taken a drill to his head.
He curls up impossibly small for a being without a body, cradling his hurt like it’s something precious.
Perhaps it is. Aren’t gifts meant to be treasured?
He breathes through it. In. Out. In. Out. Never deep enough in, never far enough out.
The images flit through his mind and he thinks, with only a vague sense of urgency, that it’s taken a while for his life to flash before his eyes.
Not even death was in a hurry to want him.
* * * * * * *
“Dude, are you serious?”
The audio has a false, tinny quality to it, but it barely takes the edge off hearing his voice again. The voice that echoes through her memories, her dreams and nightmares and sleepless nights, always cracking as it had done when the tears finally won.
I don’t wanna go.
It’s not exactly as she remembers it, though. The pitch is different, holding the unfamiliar intonation of someone younger than Jax had been. A teenager.
Teenage Jax.
Leeroy.
And then the video claims the screen in one harsh flash, swinging a sledgehammer through time and space and delivering them in a room they had no right seeing.
A bedroom from the real world. A navy comforter, rumpled from sleep, and matching curtains that had been flung open. A nightstand, a squashed pillow, a poster for a band Pomni doesn’t recognise that’s torn in the corner. There’s random crap shoved under the bed, a ratty hoodie hanging from a bedpost, a huddle of plushies that had been kicked into disarray during the night.
A real, lived-in bedroom.
And an orange cat in the centre of the everyday chaos.
“Dude!” The word is snagged by a giggle, the admonition it should have been clipped short.
The camera—Jax’s eyes, Jax’s mind, Jax’s Jax’s Jax’s—pans up and down as he watches the cat jump onto the bed and weave between piles of fresh laundry. It prowls around a tower of t-shirts, arcing its back and rubbing its head along the darkest one it can find.
“You’re gonna get fur everywhere, idiot,” Jax—Leeroy—mumbles as he scoops the cat up and sets it soundly back on the floor. It yowls woefully at him as only a betrayed cat can. “Yeah, yeah. You’re not the one who’d have to explain why I’m picking orange hair outta my armpits.”
Leeroy casts his gaze across the room. It’s an absent gesture in the moment, but they’re not in that moment anymore, are they? No, this scene has been plucked out of reality and shoved into another universe entirely, and to the people of that world, that gesture is everything.
There’s a bookcase pushed against the far wall, its shelves littered with everything except books. DVDs, a stack of tired baseball hats, a cactus in a pot painted to look like a mushroom. Post-it notes are tacked to the edges of the shelves, adorned with reminders, a couple of phone numbers, and little doodles that match the style of several drawings pinned to the walls.
A chest of drawers has a TV balanced on top, a dusty Xbox sitting next to it. Clothes spill out from the drawers below, the one at the very bottom so full that it looks like it doesn’t even close anymore. Sweaters and socks drip across the floor around an over-stuffed hamper. Another plant—a fern, maybe?—sits on the windowsill in a pot covered in stickers.
The ceiling light doesn’t have a shade on it, the paint around it peeling.
The desk is covered in textbooks and an ancient laptop surrounded by uncapped pens and highlighters.
There’s a coffee ring staining the floor.
Every single detail floods from the screen, over-saturated and in striking clarity. A patchwork of a person, each fragment telling its own story.
And in the centre, Leeroy is watching the orange cat.
Time moves slowly as the memory drags on, like when you’re hanging out with your friends at the end of summer and realise, this is it. In a few weeks, you’ll all be gone to different corners of the map for school, work, trips, and you’re living the moments that’ll become the bittersweet memories you’ll remember them all by. You’re living the moments your older, wiser self will look back on in years to come, perhaps missing the person you once were, perhaps regretting letting time steal that version of yourself away from you.
This Jax is younger, smilier, chattier. He’s babbling nonsense to a cat alone in his childhood bedroom.
He doesn’t know what’s going to come, how he’s going to be violently reshaped by one critical, devastating moment. He doesn’t know the fallout that’ll consume him and the people he’ll take down with him. He doesn’t know that strangers will be watching this intimate moment in years to come, that it’ll be displayed on a screen for analysis. Inspection. Dissection.
He doesn’t know and time has left that innocence behind.
The quiet is broken by a distant shout from deeper within the memory, and Leeroy visibly jolts. He twists his head to the door, closed tight, and then turns back to the cat and quickly picks it up to deposit it on the windowsill.
“You gotta go,” he whispers, nudging the cat towards the open window and the tree branch just below it. “C’mon, go!”
The cat stares up at him with big, soulful green eyes as it hops out into the tree, and Leeroy pulls the window shut.
He blinks, hands gripping the window frame as he steels himself, then heads for the door. Just as it clicks open, the screen suddenly switches to black, and the memory is over.
And Jax is gone again.
Pomni’s chest caves in, and the tears she’d been fighting finally win. She turns, slowly, meaningfully, back to Jax and sinks against his side. Without the blanket to separate their skin, the full force of their stinging contact hits Pomni like a charged rainstorm, electricity in every last drop.
Zooble and Gangle are talking lowly to each other. Ragatha is watching her, concern pinching her brow and helplessness fixing her to the spot. Caine and Kinger are huddled around the console like they can’t escape its orbit.
And Pomni thinks about the stars stuck to Leeroy’s bedroom ceiling, about Ribbit and Kaufmo, and about every other unassuming thing that got caught in Jax’s spiralling web of self-destruction.
* * * * * * *
The silence is almost worse. It hits like a bus, sudden and careless.
A bus would be simpler to explain. Blunt force trauma. Happens to the best and worst of us, like if justice were doled out with a dartboard and a blindfold.
Was he one of the good ones? He doesn’t remember. The word doesn’t sit right with him, anyway.
Good. He wasn’t good.
But it’s what’s left in the aftermath that makes his stomach roil.
* * * * * * *
“Fascinating.” It’s said with a kind of reverence that turns Pomni’s stomach, but her glare is only half-assed because it’s Kinger and he doesn’t deserve her ire. She turns her stare to the floor, wishing wholeheartedly she could feel something other than bone-deep dejection.
“What is it?” Ragatha asks when it becomes clear that nobody else is willing to.
“The memory came back perfectly,” Kinger explains, highlighting the code with a swipe of his hand once more. “It’s one of the most recently restored files, and I’ll admit, I had my doubts. I thought it would be patchy, or at least distorted in some way, but it’s not. The regenerated code is…faultless.”
Caine is standing beside him in front of the larger screen, prodding at the abstraction ring like one would an animal with a stick to see if it’s really dead, and tacks on, “It looks like his mind files are responding to the program faster than everything else.”
Zooble grunts, “Everything else being…”
“His avatar, for the most part.”
“Which includes his sensory processors,” Kinger interjects. “Sight, hearing. Everything that allows him to interact with the world.”
Pomni croaks, “That’s damaged?” and, God, she barely recognises her own voice. When was the last time she slept? Ate? Saw the digital sky or walked the white sand of the beach? When was the last time she did anything that didn’t have Jax at the epicentre?
Is that wrong? Should she really be clinging so hard to this? What if the worst happens and Jax doesn’t come back? What then? Where does that leave her?
What will that do to her?
Caine glances over, his shoulders bunching up with contrition for something that’s not entirely his fault, but not exactly not his fault either, and says, “Pomni…everything is damaged,” as though that’s enough of an answer, as though what they’re doing to fix it is enough.
Pomni has tried so fucking hard not to let this destroy her. It feels like with every step they’re taking in the apparent right direction, another chunk of her hope withers. With every new step, another dozen appear, and this road they’re treading—because what else is there to do in eternity?—keeps extending further and further with no end in sight.
Each sliver of progress they make is prefaced with questions and half-answers, and then it’s followed through with even more questions.
One step forward and three steps back. Again and again and again.
The silence in the tent is a palpable thing. It breathes in tandem with Jax, writhing around his body like a second skin. Pomni is at the heart of it. The source of it, maybe. The vacuum in which everything else ceases to exist.
Kinger’s soft shuffling is what breaks it, drawing Pomni back into herself. She hadn’t even noticed she’d drifted.
“Perhaps there’s something you can do,” he suggests gently, sitting himself beside her and placing a hand on her shoulder. He draws near her like he’s consoling a child, but Pomni doesn’t have the energy to be mad about it.
“And what’s that?”
She leans into him, instead.
“You could try talking to him.”
* * * * * * *
His head is underwater.
He’s drowning and he’s dead and there’s a voice that’s no longer inside his head.
It echoes in the consuming sort of way. Like dye through water, like smog through open air. It expands and thins out until it’s distorted enough that the clear, simple words become indiscernible.
Still, he tries to pick through the droning sound for something intelligible. What else is there for him to do?
It takes longer than he’d like, the noise eventually drifting into the background in the same way a house learns to forget it lives next to a freeway, but he snags one word and he bolts upright, water dripping down his back and air filling his mouth for the first time in…a while.
The word doesn’t even mean anything to him. Castle. It’s plucked from the ether, meaningless and empty and yet the most tangible thing he’s encountered since his world turned to nothing.
It’s a life ring when he’s pawing at a darkened ocean, seawater stinging his eyes and flooding his chest, turning his limbs to lead and mind to sludge and hope to shreds.
The voice felt familiar, too.
Like hearing an old friend captured on a family video. Someone he used to know a lifetime ago. Someone he cared for.
Someone he might have even loved, before…
* * * * * * *
Ragatha is worried about Pomni. To a degree, Ragatha is always worried, but it’s waned into something different, harsher, sharper. Something that she can exchange glances with the others over and know that they’re all thinking the same thing, and that just makes it real.
Pomni hardly ever leaves Jax’s tent, to the point where the two of them are becoming a single entity in her mind. Jax and Pomni. Pomni and Jax. Where Jax is, Pomni won’t be far away, and where Pomni is, the shadow of Jax lingers. A ghost, a corpse, a broken mind that clings to reality by hearts that aren’t willing to let him go yet.
It’s not healthy. It’s never going to be healthy, but she can’t say that to someone in mourning, so she keeps her mouth shut and does what she can to pretend everything is okay because that’s always what she’s been best at and there’s no use trying something new now.
The truth is simple: Ragatha has doubts about the Regeneration Program. It feels like something uttered over a wishbone, fanciful and idealistic, designed to prey on the heartbroken and desperate. The guilt the thought brings her is awful, but she can’t shake it. It follows her into the tent, blaring louder and louder in her head the longer Jax’s inactivity stretches on.
He should be moving at the very least, that much she can understand from Kinger’s quiet concern, the unspoken worry written in the looks he sends her over Pomni’s head.
Talk to her, he silently urges. She’ll listen to you.
Ragatha isn’t so sure.
Pomni’s voice is gentle as she talks to the abstraction, but it carries easily through the stifling air. She doesn’t even notice Ragatha until she’s standing only a handful of yards away, clasping her own hands since there isn’t anybody else to hold them. She clears her throat and Pomni looks up, startled for a moment, but then she smiles. Ragatha can’t tell whether it’s real or not.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”
Ragatha shakes her head. “No, it’s okay. I’m not staying, I just…” She rocks back and forth on her feet. “Just wanted to see how everything’s going. You, uh, haven’t been out much.”
Pomni drops her gaze to the ground between them. It’s beginning to feel like the space there is growing with every passing day, but Ragatha doesn’t have the heart to call her out on it. Maybe she should. Maybe that’s what Kinger meant when he sent her in.
“Yeah,” Pomni mutters, sounding chastised despite that not at all being Ragatha’s intention. “I’m sorry, I—”
But there’s nothing to be said. They’ve been in the same boat ever since Pomni tried to save Jax—sacrificing herself, Ragatha’s mind screams at her, the words vile and painfully sincere—but the seas haven’t calmed and Pomni is standing just a little too close to the edge, to the brink, to the same cliff Jax had fallen down to not return from.
“I’ve been telling him about our adventures.” Pomni shifts slightly, sliding herself across the floor so there’s a gap between her and Jax. As though Ragatha needs that space to be there and Pomni can see it in her face. “About when we toured Loolilalu’s castle.”
Ragatha forces herself to laugh. “Yeah, that was…something of a doozie, huh?”
Jax had left his mark in that world. The Fudge Monster was still roaming free, turning the city from a candy dreamscape to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The castle had been converted into a base of operations and the princess—now General Loolilalu—was leading the charge against the sweet-toothed monster since their god had apparently forsaken them—Caine wisely stuck to the back of the group for that trip.
Pomni, too, had been quiet. She’d walked those shortbread halls like she wasn’t inside her own head. Perhaps she hadn’t been—at least, not wholly.
For better or for worse, Jax was one of them. In a different way than Ribbit and Kaufmo and everyone else before them had been. Because the ones who remained were the ones who survived. They beat the game, didn’t they? They won. They’d reached the other side of hell, even if there was nothing to find there. They made it, the six of them.
And then there were five.
A piece of Pomni had died that day with Jax, had withered the moment she saw those eyes blinking at her from across the circus. So bright amid so much grey. So wrong amid so much more wrong.
“He’s…” Pomni’s voice is so much smaller than she’s ever heard it. Ragatha’s chest constricts. “He’s not coming back, is he?”
Ragatha doesn’t know what to say. What can she say? What comfort can she offer that won’t be at risk of becoming a blatant lie if Pomni is proven right? How can she stand there and assure her that Jax will return to himself, exactly as he had been, when her gut is telling her he won’t? There’s so much unknown, so many moving parts to this elaborate game of Will He, Won’t He?
And what if he does come back, but he’s different? What can any of them say then? How will they be expected to live with the mirage of a person they begrudgingly cared about? He won’t be the person who was almost their friend, the person who was one of them, the person who, Ragatha is beginning to realise, meant more to Pomni than she initially thought possible.
But without all of that, would he be the person Ribbit once saw in him? The person he was before.
Would it be wrong to hope for that person back? The slate wiped clean.
Ragatha moves slowly, slinking forward until she’s close enough to both of them that she can hear the fuzzy hum of Jax’s body. She lifts her hand, static darting across the space between them and stinging her palm. She draws back, cradling her hand to her chest.
Pomni sniffs. “Sorry. I—I don’t know why I said that.”
And Ragatha might not know what happened between Pomni and Jax, but she knows them. She knows that Pomni is hurting worse than after she first arrived, worse than after the shootout, worse than after the Abel adventure. And Ragatha knows, deep down in her core, from the time she had with Jax before it all went sour, that this isn’t what he wanted.
Jax ran and ran until he was all alone, never once looking back until it was too late. Pomni had almost broken that cycle, Ragatha had seen it even if it felt like she was losing her only friend at the time, and then Jax had gone and done what he always does and fucked it up.
Looking up at him now, Ragatha doesn’t know what she sees. Because Ragatha knows too much, while somehow not knowing anything at all, and it’s gnawing at her from the inside out.
She sees someone shattered by their self-imposed isolation, torn apart by their instinctive need to tear into others. Ragatha wants to know where that came from, whether she and Jax might have had more in common than either of them could have imagined.
But at the same time, she doesn’t forgive him. Ribbit and Kaufmo are gone because of him. That is an irrefutable truth.
Maybe he knew that. Maybe that’s what killed him. And if it is, does he even deserve a second chance when they won’t get that opportunity?
Ragatha doesn’t know.
She sits beside Pomni, closer to the monster than she would ever like to be, and holds her friend.
The grief is heavier than she thought possible.
* * * * * * *
“Y’know, I doubt anybody asked you to dive in and save her.”
“And I know nobody asked me to help, but still, I didn’t want to leave her behind.”
He chuckles to himself. It echoes back at him. “Called it.”
“Anyway, long story short, I can now add crabs to my list of phobias.”
“Crabs, huh? Must suck to suck, because that’s just lame.”
The voice began as a simmering in the distance, undefined and flimsy like a mirage. The endless space lost the soft sounds, soaking them up like cotton wool spread too thin over an open wound, but the sharp, biting consonants punched through and found him with staggering clarity.
He’d stood up and sunk his teeth into them, repeating them back to the nothingness that was the sky.
For the first time in a long time, he thinks he might have smiled.
“And…yeah. That was the last adventure I went on. It was…a few weeks ago now, I think. Maybe a month. Caine has synced us up with the real world calendar, so it’s easier to keep track. Today is June 19th, by the way.”
His current grin falls a little. It’s the strangest thing to get emotional over, but he doesn’t remember the last time he knew the day of the week. To think they could know not just the date, but the time? He feels like a drowning man rediscovering breathing, but his relief is short-lived when he doesn’t remember why he would be so excited about that.
He doesn’t remember much these days.
We could have real days again, with regular mealtimes and bedtimes and a shower schedule—
But who is we?
Him, the walking dead, and his disembodied angel of oblivion?
“Oh, and it’s Zooble’s birthday next month! I can’t remember the date, the 14th or 15th, but we’re having a party for them! We’re gonna go down to the beach, so it should be fun. The others are looking forward to it, anyway.”
“Why aren’t you?” he asks the voice despite knowing his words don’t reach wherever she is. The answer is so soft he can barely hear it.
“It’s been…difficult lately. I know what the others are thinking, but I…I don’t know. I don’t want to leave.” The voice hitches, and he swears for a second he almost recognises it. “I don’t want to leave you. And, yeah, you’ll probably laugh at that, but I…I mean it.”
He’s not laughing. He’s remembering arms around him, a light so bright he had to squeeze his eyes shut.
His light, his hope. He remembers her for that, if not her face or name.
He looks up at his empty sky and wonders if they’re one and the same.
“So, anyway, sorry, I’m probably boring you.”
He says, “Not possible. You’re surprisingly entertaining,” and wishes she could hear.
“I can’t remember if I told you that Caine is listening to our suggestions now, but pretend that I did, because—”
“Oh, of course.”
“—he’s somehow got his hands on Netflix, and he’s downloading a bunch of movies and TV shows for us to watch. It’s funny because, technically, it’s piracy, but he has no idea and nobody is telling him why he keeps hitting so many firewalls because we don’t want him to stop.”
“Living on the edge, huh.”
“It’s so great. I started Breaking Bad with Zooble last week. They’ve already seen it, but Gangle refuses to watch past the third episode, so I think I’m the next best thing. You mentioned it once, remember? Ah, that was a while ago now. Maybe you don’t. Doesn’t matter.”
He doesn’t remember. He feels like he should, that there’s no reason why he shouldn’t, but the memory evades him like a leaf in the wind.
It keeps happening to him recently. He’s not even sure how he’s aware of it, but he is. Fragments of his mind are disappearing, but not in a way that he forgets they ever existed. It’s like pieces plucked from a completed puzzle—their absence is notable, but he doesn’t know what used to plug the gap.
Maybe that’s why he can’t draw a connection between the voice that visits him and the faces he recalls from before his death.
The light feels inextricably entwined with it, too. The hope. The presence that had held him in his final moments.
“Kinger suggested I read to you, in case I ran out of things to say, but…I don’t know. I don’t even know what you’d like.” There’s a pause. “Caine thought music would be a good alternative, but, again, I don’t know what you’re into. We never got to talk about things like that.”
Guilt hits him instantly. Somehow he knows it’s his fault. Just add it to the list at this point.
“Then Zooble said I should play you the corniest romcoms I can find. They thought you’d hate that enough to…come back, I guess. Resurrection through pure spite, or something.”
He stops pacing. The water reaches his knees now, and the sound of his legs being dragged through the shallow sea is one of the most beautiful things he’s ever heard. He almost lost himself to the crushing silence, and wouldn’t that have been something. Who loses themselves twice?
Perhaps there is something worse than death after all.
He stoops, dragging his hand through the water. He can’t feel the droplets trickling down his hand and forearm, gathering at his elbow and falling away, but he knows they’re there. He hears the pattering as they return to their home, rejoining the ocean that’s slowly consuming him.
The voice is still speaking to him, but he’s tuned it out. He dips his hand into the water again, moving his foot so that the ring of light it sets off illuminates the space just enough that he can see the spread of his fingers.
“That’s…”
He moves his foot again. Another ring. Another silhouette.
“Jax?”
Again. This time, the ring glitches. The hand he doesn’t have twitches.
“That’s not right.”
And then the whole world trembles.
* * * * * * *
“Nothing happened, we were just—”
She’s panicked and nauseous and nobody is even listening to her and she can’t tell whether that’s for the best or not.
“I was just talking to him. Nothing changed. He was fine until…” The words are acrid on her tongue, dripping like bile over her teeth. “Until he wasn’t.”
The abstraction rears its head back, and the screech it tears from its own throat is enough to shatter glass. Pomni clamps her hands over the ears she doesn’t have, a knee-jerk reaction from another lifetime. She ducks, squeezes her eyes shut, tries to block it out, bury her head, cease existing if only for a moment—
Jax screams and screams and screams.
“What’s the matter with him?” Ragatha shouts at no one in particular. She’s hunched over as well, but her focus is fixed like a string pulled taut. She can’t look away from him—from it.
Caine, the only one unaffected by the pitch of the uproar, has the screen up in front of him and is swiping through files too fast to read. He stops on one, enlarges it, and the twin rings of the Abstraction and the Regeneration Program fill the air.
Only, the red ring is vibrating violently, its edge grating along the outside of the abstraction. The blue ring pushes back, eerily still and brazenly steadfast.
“The regeneration is failing,” Caine states simply. The number of files it contains has been steadily growing as the days pass. The little number in its corner reads 19%, with rows of bright, functioning code to show for it.
Code that’s glitching frenziedly. Code that’s failing.
“What does that mean?” Kinger asks, and the fact it’s him asking sends a bolt of bone-deep fear spearing through Pomni’s chest.
“I—I don’t know.” Caine steps away and his eyes roll back, his mind leaving his avatar and diving into the server itself. His hands move jerkily, shifting left to right with intentions Pomni can’t see, can’t imagine, can’t even begin to comprehend.
The Jax pulls against the restraints looped over his body and fastened to the ground. His back arches, his legs straining as he tries to stand, but the binds hold tight.
Zooble flinches, pushing Gangle behind themself. “Should we even be here?” they ask. “What if he—”
What if he breaks loose?
What if he takes them all out with him?
What if he actually dies and there’s nothing anyone can do about it?
“We need to stay,” Gangle says, barely loud enough to be heard. Their ribbon curls around Zooble’s clenched hand, loosening their fist until their hands can slot together. Pomni turns away, heart in her throat, stomach plummeting.
“Can we do anything?” Kinger yells, visibly torn between his computer and heading over to Jax himself.
Caine doesn’t answer, doesn’t come back to them, doesn’t do anything as Jax pulls again, twisting his body, heaves forward so he has momentum and jerks back again—
One of the binds snaps.
The world falls out of focus as Pomni runs up to him. She doesn’t think, doesn’t breathe. She places her hands on his chest, the pain of their contact sharper this time. Her hands glitch, her avatar fracturing.
“Jax!” she screeches, voice splintering, clawing at him as though her touch might be enough to calm him, as though it ever was. “Leeroy!”
“Pomni!” Ragatha is behind her, grasping several lengths of rope. “Pomni, you need to move away—”
“I know what we need to do.” Caine’s voice cleaves through the fraught air. His pupils have returned, and they’re fixed on Jax. “The Regeneration Program is destabilising due to conflicts between that—” he points at Jax, the monster, the abstraction “—and his avatar’s code. They can’t coexist. It’s one or the other.”
Pomni stares up at the beast, peering into its flickering eyes, and wonders whether he can see her.
“Jax? Jax, it’s me. You’re okay, you’re okay. We’re going to fix this, I promise.” She breathes the words against him, her voice melding with his broken body, and, for just a second, he stills. “Jax?”
She doesn’t hear Caine coming up behind her, but she feels his presence. The air around him hums with potential, and when she turns, she realises he’s holding a harness built out of Zooble’s parts.
Pomni holds her breath, waiting for the inevitable.
Caine’s eyes flit up, over her, to Jax. “We have to get him out.”
* * * * * * *
The water is rising. It swallows his legs and hips, crawling up his torso at a rate he can’t keep up with.
He’s breathing, but it’s never deep enough.
It’s never enough. Nothing is ever enough.
He looks up. There are more voices now, enough that he can’t keep track of who is who and who’s saying what. They merge, twisting into a cacophony of hysteria and dread that makes his skin crawl, his head pound, his blood turn to ice.
He’s breathing faster.
In. Out. In. Out. In—
“Jax!”
They keep saying that name. Whose name is that?
“No, you can’t—”
“I have to.”
In. Out. In until his chest burns. Out until he caves in.
“…no other way—”
“Kinger!”
“I don’t—”
The ground grinds beneath his feet, like tectonic plates pushing against one another until they crumple. His whole world shakes. The water ripples, then surges higher.
It reaches his neck.
“…save him! I have to try—”
“—harness—”
“Leeroy?”
“Wait!”
He’s panicking now. The water is too high, salvation too far away. He can’t swim, can’t fly. Can’t even die because he’s already dead.
All that’s left for him is fear and a grief he can’t find the root of.
In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. Faster, faster, faster—
He turns his face to the empty sky, terror morphing into desperation disguised as courage, and screams, “HELP!”
* * * * * * *
The harness is too tight. It cuts into Pomni’s sides, biting harder when she moves.
“Are you certain you know how to find him?” Kinger asks yet again, a worried look in his eyes that Pomni tries not to let dampen her resolve. It’s hard when she turns so frequently to him for consolation—where do you go when the support beneath you crumbles?
Down, usually.
Down and down and down.
“Yes,” she says, even if she doesn’t truly mean it. She only found him last time because he’d still had the awareness to open up to her, his consciousness drifting just this side of lucid before the light took him and she lost the very thing she might lo—
Doesn’t matter now. Water under the bridge, as they say.
Zooble comes up to her, eyeing Jax warily. The bind that broke has been replaced by three more of the same, effectively pinning Jax to the ground since not even the near-pitch-black they’re working in is enough to calm him anymore. Even so, Zooble looks one wrong move away from bolting.
“Remember,” they tell Pomni, “tug twice when you’re ready to be pulled out.”
And before she can stop herself—because her nerves are gnawing at her and Jax is still flailing—she asks, “Twice?”
Zooble’s hands twist around the rope tethered to Pomni’s harness. “Because we don’t know what shit you’ll find in there. Two tugs in quick succession, then we’ll know for sure.”
Makes sense.
Pomni breathes deeply, looks up, and meets the dozens of eyes staring down at her.
She steps up to the abstraction that feels less and less like Jax with every passing day, and presses her hand to its chest. She hesitates for half a second, and then she pushes forward.
Then she’s falling.
* * * * * * *
He doesn’t remember when the water claimed him, but it burns inside his chest like it was always meant to be there, like it’s returning home.
He doesn’t try to breathe. Dead men don’t breathe. He tries to swim, to surface, but the water doesn’t want to let him go. It’s got its claws in him, winding into his bloodstream, entwining with his bones until he doesn’t recognise where he ends and the ocean begins.
He is dead, the darkness writhes, and they are one.
It doesn’t come as a surprise when the world shudders one last time, bidding him farewell from this unearthly plane. The water trembles, but he feels none of it.
It should be enough for him, but it’s not. It never could be. And maybe that’s exactly what he deserves.
And just when he thinks all is said and done, the sky breaks apart and the stars shine just for him. Their flickering eyes sparkle at him through the sea’s haze, their shine muted by distance.
But even with his eyes shut, he sees the light burning far above.
Burning brighter.
And brighter.
She’s so beautiful.
Then the light grabs him and pulls.