Chapter Text
In the darkness, Jax thinks there is someone here to save him.
In the darkness, Jax knows there is not.
“I didn’t know you could play the piano,” he hears anyway, in the shape of an echo.
“I only know, like, two songs,” he responds in the countering silence, and maybe to no one at all - assuredly, this is just a dream unwanted.
But the empty floor begins to fill with wet pops and he doesn't remember where he was before this, so, he manages a gravelly whisper.
“Why are you here?”
The blood bright lamp bleeds over his head, catching onto a reassurance that falls like pennies into a well, catching onto his left hand that burns with static; the incessant ache between his ribcage is too realistic to mistake it anymore.
“You know everything now. So, why are you here?”
In the darkness he is the only one submerged in the red light, and his fingers move sluggishly through the wetness of the abyss to catch himself. For a moment, Jax thinks he is drowning. Even then, he tries to hum out a laugh.
He swallows saltwater instead and comes up with a shackled throat. The chains rattle in the distance, craving to compress his trachea and carve into it at the same time, holding him underwater and keeping him there like a dirtied dish. Unforgivable, he thinks, and that is the punishment bestowed upon him, he thinks.
“Just…to rub every mistake I’ve ever made into my face?” he sniffs.
Still, how horrible do you think I am? Are you here for one last testimony before you throw dirt upon my name?
A thin red ribbon stretches across his neck, and the slicing pain comes in cascades when he speaks; a slow, self-dissection of his throat to reach for the words he would not say before, and he is blanched at his own discovery. He realizes he cannot continue using his voice for long - he got this body for free and now he is paying the price in full. He realizes how hard he is holding himself back as he attempts to cast away the congested heaving of his breaths.
“I'm a terrible person. Is that what you want me to say?”
Do you remember the shape of my breath? I remember yours. It was too gentle and true to be here. You would have never fit into the concave hell of me. No, you would have slipped out so easily - you, the matador who never had the guts to kill the bull - you, who should have hung my guts from the chandelier of the manor.
Maybe you are here to save me. Maybe I don't deserve to be saved.
“I already know I am.”
The thin red ribbon pulls tighter and tighter until his voice spills out from his neck with blood.
“So why does anyone still care about me? You’re not supposed to care.”
She breaches the dark waters of this place against it all, consigning her footsteps to colourful rings ricocheting until they meet Jax’s feet; she parts the sea all on her own with a glint in her eye of something he cannot straight himself out and around to capture.
You saw me in that fateful flurry with another person I treated the same as you. Might as well have pushed her far enough until she went tumbling down that cliff, right? Don’t you fear the force I’ll apply to you as well?
Please, just— don’t come any closer.
Despite himself, he does not tear down the confines of the dimension in time for Pomni to reach him.
“You’re not supposed to miss me.”
She draws closer and closer like lava inching toward his feet; a boundless burn near kissing his skin. The radiation is already white-hot and searing against his skull, and his head hurts more than ever before. He would like to cradle it in his hands, hold it tight enough until it explodes like a watermelon, let her watch it all in bright mahogony spatters. He contemplates turning now, back against the red lamp, face toward her, and he tries with all his might not to wait for it.
He tries not to wait for her, but the tusk shell of his heart begins to rattle like ancient pillars caught in the brute of a cyclone. (What will remain when there is nothing left, Pomni? Are you willing to go, too?)
He tries not to wait for her, but the twinge begins to feel like a bullet wound to his temple.
He hears her closing in on him from behind but his eyes are to a black wall, to a corner of this little world he is graced to look at - to be resigned to. He scrabbles for leverage this time, but the cherry medulla of the lamp has torched his skin raw and claimed his will like a prison keeper. He stands with no fight left in him, chainmail broken in, and the only weapon left is in his trembling tongue.
Why? Why chase after me? I have nothing to offer, nothing to give.
The world isn’t meant to run on your rules, so if this is the one thing you could keep within the palms of your hands, wouldn’t you?
God damnit, Pomni. Don’t you get it? I don’t have to be in your world anymore.
She grows ever closer like a comet, leaving behind chemtrails for no one else to follow, and hell, he can’t begin to understand why.
“You’re not supposed to love me.”
He is bleeding as he sobs, his words encompassing his body like a balm when they are not caught like burrs in the empty spaces of his mouth, but it somehow singes his skin anyway. It is released into the wild from the bilges of his core - there is a love that exists for him that he does not deserve. There is a love that abets his sins and is the contrast to his sickly convention. There is a love that is just out of reach, still intangible and it always will be.
Jax cannot take it anymore. His fists curl in front of him. His left one numbs like a cavity.
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.”
He has felt this before, he’s sure. The surge of electricity through his knuckles, the conduction of it meeting the skin of another. The point of contact unbridles him. Peels off the fear from his face and leaves his flesh exposed to the salt in the water.
He once learned he likes the taste, so he goes to swallow some more.
But he remembers when she hit the ground and it became tasteless. The salt in the wound had begun to sting. Even now when it is almost over, the stinging pulls harder at the strands of his flesh. His hands are stilled fists, and the grip is so tight he wishes it could have been what taught the monster restraint. He thinks if he lets go, it will be fully unleashed.
He won’t let it get anywhere near Pomni this time.
“Please… Leave me alone. You’re making this so much harder.”
He brings his hands up to his eyes to soak up beading tears in their attempts to run down his chin in a fervid hot current. He presses into his sockets, pleading them to dry and he presses harder, shoulders rolling in, and his skull feels like it is going to fracture under the force of his nature. He never knows when to stop.
And Pomni catches him right before he falls, so he thinks this in spite of himself - she always will. The lava tames into a sun-baked beach wave lapping against the back of his legs. He feels her wrap around him and his sobs break into short huffs.
“You’re making this…so much harder.” He has never felt this small in a room before. He wonders if Pomni’s astute senses are reading into this, too, just as they watch his loose tears patter against the floor.
Her voice is lined with cracks, and Jax thinks it is so fragile it might shatter.
“You should’ve just talked to me, man.”
He never meant for it to go this far. “It’s too late. I did this to myself.”
His head dangles back, limp in the blinding red of the lamp. If it doesn’t swallow him whole, the embrace of Pomni’s arms surely will. They nearly melt into his salmon overalls like paraffin.
“There’s no coming back from this.” His admission is as hushed as a breath; the silent death of a web.
“Then…” Pomni starts, voice slipping out from a croak, “talk to me now.”
She pulls him closer toward her, but Jax intercepts. He spins himself out of her hold, still close, still warm, eyes tracing down to hers. He lets his knees buckle before her.
He catches her between his own arms this time, riveting his hand on the back of her fool’s cap - their bodies compress so deeply into it he thinks their skin might adhere forever. He feels her hands climbing to his shoulder blades, fingers coaxing them to loosen. The lamp heats up his neck and it begins to beat down on him. He is warmer than he’s ever been before.
“I hate you, you know that?” Jax’s arms pull taut around her, anchoring the warmth between them.
Neither of them show any signs of letting go. They snivel into the knot of their bodies harder.
“You always have to go and complicate things,” he reprimands through his sobs.
How could I possibly be the one who galvanizes you to?
“It's what I do,” she chuckles through her own.
His fingers curl tighter around the blue and red fabric, elbows locking them in place. He plasters himself against her like a bug on a wall, and it is the first time he realizes how much he has sunken right into it. He notices a portion of the pain has been ebbed out of his body through the limbs. The leftovers sink to the bilges of his stomach.
“I don’t want to go.”
His eyes flit wider. Even in the arms of forgiveness he grows colder, and he understands now, it will never cease to the simple flecks of warmth. It will never cease because of all that he is. Increment by increment, the distance of each of his breaths runs further and further until he can no longer map out how many remain prodding at the exit of his lungs.
The leftovers whirl into a maelstrom. He should’ve known.
I was ready to be gone by now, so why is this so terrifying?
He makes one more wish.
His shoulders bob to the rhythm of his heaving as he draws in giant puffs. The exhaustion sweeps him up and he is so desperate to clear his lungs, but his tears run hot down his cheeks and catch in his mouth. He feels like he is going to secrete all the sin, the rue and the anguish from his core, but it comes out as all retch and no vomit. He thinks, with his trembling hands grasping urgently at the saint before him, that this is what dying is.
A thick, wintry cold of a mountain’s summit swarms around his body. He can no longer shut his eyes.
“Stay with me.”
He is neck-deep in it now, the tail ends of her words whipping at his limbs cuttingly. If he stays, hell follows. If he doesn't, he'll bathe in it. He has already accepted the shackles to inferno’s rocks.
Yet she still digs her arms into his sides and her hands into his back to moor him deeper in her cocoon. Jax doesn’t want to feel anything else ever again.
He breathes and breathes and breathes into the dip of Pomni's neck, and then he slows.
“You’re staying, Jax.”
His bones laxen and he wraps around her tighter. The heat whorls on his skin in puddles before the blood wash of the lamp disappears.