Chapter Text
Over time, the tent had been slowly moved from the center of the main hall further into a corner of the circus to make room for new construction. Everyone had gotten better at conjuring items, and customization was made possible by Caine giving everyone free rein. For the first time in so long, everyone felt as if they could let their creative freedom run wild and make this a space for themselves.
The tent now sat near the back of the main hall, half-tucked between a painted support beam and where the edge of the main stage starts. Blue and purple blankets had been draped over a frame of bent poles and soft blocks, layered thickly enough that barely any of the circus’s artificial light could slip through the seams. Pillows had been pushed around the base to keep the blankets pinned down and sturdy. Despite Caine's offer to reconstruct it, no one had really tried to improve it too much, mostly because it seemed to work and was cozy nonetheless.
Inside, it was almost completely dark, which was the point.
Pomni had been wary of the dark when she first arrived, though she had never admitted that to anyone since it did not seem relevant. Back then the dark would plague her dreams, showing her endless pits of emptiness and nothing where she would fall so far no one could find her. But now, the dark inside the tent had become something else, not exactly comfort, but still gave her a sense of peace. It allowed her to feel the presence of the large thing curled up in the middle of the tent, without having to stare too hard.
She had learned, over time, how close she could sit.
At first, they had all kept their distance because no one knew what the corruption might do if it touched them for too long. The first few days after they moved him into the tent, Pomni would only crouch near the entrance and peer in like she was checking on a wounded animal that might still bite. Then she started sitting with her knees drawn up inside the entrance, close enough to see the occasional blink of one colored eye in the dark. After that came the pillow at the edge of the tent, then the blanket she would bring for comfort because she had begun staying there long enough to need one. Now, after weeks of testing the boundary in tiny, nervous increments, Pomni could casually lie a few feet away from him without worry.
Jax did not seem to mind. When she would come to be near him, saying nothing for an hour and listening to the soft, irregular static moving through the dark beside her, it never seemed to irritate him. Sometimes one of his eyes would open and turn vaguely in her direction, but it was impossible to know whether that meant he recognized her, or noticed movement, or simply reacted to whatever scraps of input an abstracted mind could still process. Pomni had stopped trying to turn every blink into a message.
Time had always moved funny in the digital plane. But if she was to guess, Pomni would say it had been maybe five to six months since Jax had abstracted, and Caine had let the group off of their leash. Everyone had continued living, making the most of the space around them and enjoying each other's company. Everything really was better than before. Of course, being stuck with the same four people (plus one AI) all the time resulted in occasional annoyance, but Pomni wouldn't have it any other way.
Well, technically she would, but she couldn't bring herself to wish for the impossible. Constantly chasing an unattainable goal drives you crazy. Finding peace in how things uncontrollably are is the only way to go about life here, and she knew and accepted that.
Pomni laid on her side with one arm tucked under her cheek and watched the dim shape of him shift against the blankets she put around him. Most of him disappeared in the dark unless an eye opened, or a line of color flickered across the surface of his abstracted body and briefly outlined the curve of himself.
“Caine expanded the grounds again,” she said. “There’s a field now, past the old candy canyon area. It doesn’t really do anything. It’s just chocolate grass, a few hills, some fields full of lollypops and whatnot. Gangle found a pond and got excited because there were swedish fish in it, but then realized how sticky the liquid in the pond was a little too late after dipping her feet in. Zooble ended up carrying her back to the circus.”
The dark shape beside her remained still.
Pomni rubbed her thumb over the seam of the pillow under her head, following the same little ridge back and forth until the motion became automatic. It was strange, the things that became easy after enough time passed. Sitting near him had once felt impossible, and now it was the only place in the circus where she could easily let herself feel.
“I think you would’ve complained about it if you had come with us, to be honest,” she added after a moment, her voice softer than before. “Not because there was anything actually wrong with it. Just because it would’ve bothered you that there was not much to do besides look around.”
A faint ripple moved through him, low and slow, like a grainy groan.
Pomni’s eyes flicked over to him. She waited, foolishly still for a moment, then let out a breath when nothing else happened. The old reflex embarrassed her.
Outside the tent, the others went about their day. There were distant voices somewhere near the stage, Gangle’s softer one and Ragatha’s patient reply, followed by a thump that was probably Kinger clumsily dropping something as a result of him not wearing his bucket all the time. The sounds came through the blankets dimmed and flattened, giving a weirdly soothing white noise that Pomni didn't mind.
Pomni shifted onto her back and stared into the darkness above her. She folded her hands over her stomach and listened to the low buzz of him beside her. She was trying to live around this. She wanted to visit without waiting for a miracle every time she pulled the blanket flap aside. She wanted to be able to let him be what he was now, even if there were days when the memory of his arms around her felt so close that she could barely stand the space between them.
The tent entrance moved, letting in a thin wedge of light. Pomni turned her head.
Caine’s eyes appeared in the opening first, hovering just outside the tent rather than barging in. A few months ago, he would have burst through the blankets with trumpets and a spotlight. Now he paused at the entrance, his gloved hands folded under his chin, watching her with an expression of such concentrated concern that Pomni wasn't used to seeing from him still.
“Pomni?” he said, with his newly learned delicate tone.
She pushed herself up onto one elbow. “Yeah?”
“I was advised not to enter without asking, so I am not entering without asking.”
“Oh," she said. "Thanks, Caine.”
“Of course.” He remained exactly where he was, though his head tilted sideways. “May I enter?”
Pomni glanced at Jax, then back at Caine. The abstracted mass had not moved much, though two eyes had opened toward the light. “Maybe not all the way. I can hear you from here.”
“Ah. Partial entry. A fair compromise.”
Pomni sat up fully and pulled her knees close to her chest, giving herself a moment to adjust to the light cutting across the blankets. “Did you need something?”
Caine’s expression brightened at the question, then dimmed again almost immediately, as if he had remembered that cheerfulness was not always the correct tool. “I was checking on you.”
“Oh.”
“I have been doing that,” he added, sounding both proud and uncertain. “Subtly.”
Pomni looked at him. “Uh-huh.”
“I have noticed,” he continued, “that you continue to spend a great deal of time here.”
Pomni’s shoulders tightened a bit. “Is that a problem?”
“No. Not a problem. Merely a pattern.” His gaze drifted past her into the dark, toward the vague outline of Jax. “I have been trying to become more aware of patterns that are consistent in you humans. To help me better understand. This particular pattern of yours appears to be related to sadness.”
Pomni gave a weak, humorless little breath. “I guess.”
Caine adjusted his hands and looked down at them. “I do not mean to pry. Well, I do mean to observe, but I have been informed that observing becomes prying when the observed party feels unpleasantly perceived.”
“That sounds like Ragatha.”
“It was Zooble, actually.”
“Really?”
“They used more profanity, though.”
Pomni looked down despite herself, smiling just a bit. The expression did not last long, but Caine noticed it and straightened himself.
“I only wondered,” he said, more quietly, “whether this is helping.”
Pomni rubbed her fingertips against the fabric of her blanket. She did not answer at first because she did not know which answer would be least untrue. The visits helped in the sense that leaving him alone felt worse. They hurt in the sense that she always had to leave eventually. They calmed her down, they made her sad, they gave her somewhere to put the part of herself that still wanted to talk to him. But all in all, they did not seem to change anything within her.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Caine nodded slowly, seemingly filing the answer away. “I see.”
Pomni wished he would stop looking at her like that. She truly preferred to keep this specific part of her to herself. Making a larger deal out of how she felt or didn't feel about Jax did not appeal to her at all. “I’m okay, Caine.”
“You say that often when signs show you are not.”
She blinked.
He clasped his hands together. “Another pattern.”
Pomni stared at him for a second, then looked away toward the dark center of the tent. Her chest had gone tight, though not with anger. She was just still not used to Caine noticing things like that, and she was even less used to him being right.
“I’m not waiting for him to come back or anything,” she said, because maybe that was the part she needed someone to understand. “I know he’s not going to. I just don’t want him to be by himself all the time.”
Caine did not answer quickly. “I understand,” he said eventually, and then amended, “or I am attempting to.”
Caine remained at the entrance for a moment longer, his gloved fingers resting against the edge of the blanket flap without pushing it open any farther. His gaze shifted from Pomni to the dark shape behind her, then back again.
“What is it like?” he asked.
Pomni blinked. “What?”
“This,” he said, gesturing gently, though the gesture still had too much flourish to seem entirely natural. “Coming here. Sitting with him. Speaking to him when he cannot respond. I understand the behavior in theory, I think, but the purpose of it is… difficult to map.”
Pomni looked down at her hands. The question should not have been that hard. But something about having to explain it made her feel embarrassed, as if grief were a private habit she had been caught practicing.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m just… mourning him.”
Caine grew very still. “Mourning,” he repeated.
“Yeah,” Pomni said, then winced. “I mean, kind of. It’s not— I know he’s not dead, technically. Or maybe he is." She let out a small, uncomfortable breath and rubbed at the side of her shoulder. “I don’t know. It just feels better to be close. Since there is nothing else I can do.”
Caine looked past her again. In the dark, one of Jax’s eyes opened, faint and colorful, watching Pomni without her knowing.
“I have never mourned,” Caine said after a while.
Pomni glanced up.
“At least, I do not think I have,” he continued. “There were times, before the disconnection, when I attempted to contact the company. The original administrators. My creators, I suppose, if that is an acceptable term, though it feels imprecise.” His voice had not lost its theatrical polish exactly, but it had lowered to feel less prepared. “When I was cut off, I continued trying for quite some time. I thought if I could only speak to them, they might explain what I did wrong. Or restore access. Or let me back in.”
Pomni did not know what to say, so she just listened.
Caine glanced back up too quickly, like he had noticed the silence and mistaken it for discomfort he was supposed to fix. “Of course, that is not mourning. That is merely failed correspondence over an extended period.”
“No, I—” Pomni started, then stopped, because she did not know enough about him to tell him what his own loneliness was called. The thought made her feel strangely rude, like she had walked into a room she had not known existed and found him standing there alone. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not that different.”
Caine’s expression brightened, just a little. Pomni looked away first. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound so dramatic. I’m not, like… mourning mourning. I've accepted that there is nothing more I can do. I just miss him.”
“Your friend,” Caine said.
Pomni paused, then nodded. “Yeah. My friend.”
Caine was quiet again, and though Pomni could not tell whether he understood, he seemed to settle around the answer. Caine remained at the entrance with his gaze fixed somewhere between Pomni and the shape behind her, his eyes caught in a strange expression she could not read.
“Caine?”
He startled. “Yes?”
“Do you, uh, need anything else?”
His posture straightened at once. “Oh, no that is all. Would you like for me to leave?”
Pomni was a little impressed that he was able to take the hint. “Kind of.”
“Oh. Then I will go.” He nodded. “Immediately.”
The tent entrance fell shut before Pomni could respond.
For a while, she stayed where she was, listening to the circus outside and the static beside her. The darkness settled again after the interruption.
She looked toward Jax.
“I know,” she murmured, though she was not sure what she was responding to. “That was weird.”
An eye opened near the curve of his abstracted form, its color vivid in the dark. Pomni let herself look at it for a moment before lowering her gaze.
“I'm glad he’s trying, though.” she said.
The eye blinked once, slow and meaningless.
Pomni leaned back against the pillows and stayed there for a long while after, until the sounds outside shifted from casual chatter to the louder, more uneven rhythm of people gathering near the stage nearby. At first she ignored it. A shout did not mean anything by itself, but then came the sudden chorus of startled voices that followed a second later.
Then she heard Ragatha yelling, which was very unusual.
There was something wrong with her raised voice, not quite panic and not quite warning. She sounded alarmed but confused and like she was trying not to frighten anyone before she understood what there was to be frightened of.
Pomni pushed herself upright, pausing only long enough to glance back toward the dark shape beside her. Jax had not moved much, though several of his eyes had opened toward the noise beyond the tent. For a second, she stayed caught there between the tent and the world outside of it, one hand pressed into the pillows, the other already reaching for the tent flap. Then Zooble called out something within the commotion, and Pomni disappeared through the entrance.
The main hall was so bright after the tent that she had to squint against it. At first, she only saw the backs of the others gathered on the stage, all of them arranged in an uneasy half-circle that made the space between them look deliberate. Ragatha had one hand extended in front of her with her palm turned outward, held there like she was trying to show she meant no harm to something in front of her. Gangle hovered several steps behind her with both hands pressed around the edge of her mask, while Zooble stood off to the side observing seemingly in shock. Kinger lingered near the edge of the group, unusually silent, his attention fixed on something in front of them all that Pomni could not see from where she stood.
Nobody had noticed her leave the tent. They were all focused on the figure on the floor of the stage.
Pomni took one step closer, then another, her body moving on the numb assumption that if she could just see what they were looking at, the unsettled feeling in her stomach would explain itself. Ragatha was speaking in a low voice now, the kind she used when someone was scared or upset.
“—okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“Get back!”
The voice cracked through the hall, and Pomni saw Gangle flinch.
At first, she did not recognize it. The pitch was wrong, or the fear in it was causing it to sound different. Then the last few feet of distance closed in front of her, Ragatha shifted slightly to one side, and from the floor near the stage, Pomni saw him.
Jax was sitting on the floor with his back pressed hard against the wall on the stage, his legs were drawn up unevenly toward his chest, angled awkwardly to one side as though he'd scrambled backward until there was nowhere left to go. His ears hung around his shoulders, one twisted awkwardly where he kept gripping at it, dragging his fingers along the side of his head in frantic, searching motions. He was breathing fast, and his eyes moved over the room without landing anywhere long enough to show understanding.
He looked terrified.
“Stay away from me,” Jax snapped, though the command came out ragged and unsteady, losing its edge.
A pillow flew across the floor and landed a few feet short of Ragatha with a soft, harmless bounce.
Ragatha’s expression tightened, but she did not move closer. “Jax,” she said softly.
His eyes cut to her. “Stop calling me that!”
Ragatha’s hand lowered an inch, not enough to drop completely, just enough for Pomni to notice the falter. “You don't remember? It’s your name—”
“No, it isn’t,” he said, cutting her off, and the panic in his face sharpened defensively as his gaze darted from Ragatha to Zooble to Gangle, then to the empty space between them, searching for an explanation that would not come. “I—I don’t know what my name is. Why can't I remember? I—” He grabbed at his face hard enough to hurt.
“Who are you people? Where am I? How do I get this thing off?”
Pomni felt the silence stretch across the hall and knew, with a sick kind of clarity, that everyone was trying to solve the same impossible problem at once. They knew him, but he did not know them? Pomni had just been with him in the tent. How was he even here?
Shock and confusion overwhelmed Pomni, restraining her from making any moves or processing what was in front of her.
His eyes lowered and found Pomni. He had been looking at his surroundings so sporadically, his eyes darting everywhere in a panic, but landing on Pomni, they lingered.
The look lasted only a moment, but it opened something in her so suddenly that she had to press her hand against the side of the stage to stay steady. There was nothing in his face when he looked at her except fear, suspicion, and the quick assessment of another strange cartoon character in the room. No recognition passed through him, no flicker of annoyance softened by history, no private grief, no guarded fondness, none of the things she remembered when she thought of him.
His fingers tightened into clawing the skin on his face. “What are you guys supposed to be? Why do you look like that?”
Pomni’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Ragatha noticed, and turned just enough to catch Pomni’s eye. “Pomni, stay back for a second.”
Jax’s attention snapped between them. His breathing hitched, and the fear on his face grew suspicion as he looked from Ragatha to Pomni and back again.
“You—" he said, clearing his throat. "You guys know me,”
Ragatha took a careful breath. “Yes.”
“How?”
Jax swallowed again, and Pomni saw the moment he realized no one was going to answer quickly enough to comfort him.
Pomni climbed onto the stage and walked closer. “Jax.”
He looked at her again, and the absence of recognition was no easier for her the second time.
His mouth twitched. “Everybody keeps saying that! I don't know who that is.”
Before Pomni could answer, the air near the stage split open in a burst of white light, and Caine appeared with half of his usual theatrical flourish already underway. Whatever announcement he had prepared died the moment he took in the scene below him. His eyes moved from the group to Jax, then to the tent, then back to Jax with dawning horror.
“Oh,” Caine said.
Jax stared up at him, still frightened. “What the hell is that?”
Caine lifted his hands, suddenly cautious. “Now, now, there is no need for alarm.”
Jax just looked at him, eyes wide. The speed of his breathing picked up more every second.
Caine hovered closer despite the way Jax recoiled from him. “You are experiencing some initial disorientation, which is perfectly understandable given the unexpected nature of your instantiation.”
“Caine,” Ragatha said, very slowly, “what did you do?”
Caine did not answer her right away. Jax was breathing harder, his eyes darting around the hall again, clawing at his face for the headset he believed must be there.
“I want out,” Jax said. “Get this thing off me!” He scratched at his face.
Pomni moved, her chest aching from the whiplash of suddenly seeing him like this. Her hand lifted an inch, and she began walking closer to him. “There isn’t—”
He jerked away from her so sharply that she stopped where she was.
He was scared, she knew that, but it was hard not to take it personally when she knew him all too well. Pomni lowered her hand and curled it against her palm, suddenly aware of how close she had come to reaching out to him.
Caine sighed and straightened. “My apologies,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
Jax went slack.
Ragatha gasped, Gangle cried out, and Pomni was at his side before she realized she was closing the distance. He had collapsed onto the floor in an awkward sprawl, one arm tucked beneath him and his ears fallen over part of his face cartoonishly. Pomni knelt beside him without touching him at first, staring at his sudden stillness with a fear she could not justify when only moments ago she had been lying in the tent beside a version of him far more haunting than this. After a moment, she carefully freed the arm caught under his side and moved it into a less painful-looking position.
“What…" Pomni turned her head to Caine. "What did you do to him?” she asked, her voice low.
“He is only unconscious,” Caine said quickly, eager to clarify. “Temporarily, harmlessly, and with the express purpose of preventing further distress or injury.”
Zooble stepped forward, their attention fixed on Jax for a moment before snapping up to Caine. “Start explaining. Now.”
Caine looked from Zooble to Ragatha to Pomni, then back toward the blue and purple tent tucked near the corner beside the stage. Pomni did not follow his gaze at first because she already knew what was there.
“I was attempting a reconstruction of sorts,” Caine said. “Or, more precisely, a code repair using his archived scan file as a clean reference structure. The original backup scan remained intact, and I believed it might be possible to use that earlier version to stabilize the corruption in the current code. They are, or should be, identical files.”
Zooble stared daggers at him, signaling for him to continue, but Caine hesitated, finding his words before Zooble finally spoke instead. “Caine, just tell us what is going on here.”
Ragatha’s gaze had drifted to Jax’s unconscious face, and Pomni saw unease move over her expression, like she was remembering something.
“The files were incompatible,” Caine continued, quieter now. “There was too much developmental divergence between the archived scan and the corrupted version. The code rejected the merge, and instead of repairing Jax, it instantiated the archived scan…separately.”
Gangle’s hands tightened around her mask. “So, this is him from when he first came here? He doesn't remember anything?”
“As far as I can determine,” Caine said.
Kinger leaned forward from behind Ragatha, his eyes narrowed with unusual focus. “But he already came here.” Kinger was not wearing his bucket, so it was hard to determine how much of this he really understood.
Zooble turned fully toward Caine. “You brought him back to the beginning of being trapped here?”
Caine’s face pinched with confusion, like he was trying to understand why a solved equation had made everyone angry. “I did not intend for him to be separate. But this is, indeed, still Jax.”
“Caine, he doesn't remember anything about us,” Pomni said.
She was still looking at Jax, at the unfamiliar softness of his unconscious face and the way fear had not fully left him even with his eyes closed.
Caine paused for a few moments. “I believed,” he said at last, “that restoring him would help.”
Zooble gave a dragged out sigh. “Caine, I wish you would have asked us about this beforehand." Their eyes narrowed. “We’re doing better here, sure, but that doesn’t magically make this place not cruel and a literal mind prison. No human should be forced to go through this because you got curious and hit the big shiny restore button. We need to end the cycle. Do you understand?”
"Yeah," Ragatha chimed in. "It's inhumane to put someones consciousness through this, whether they're just a scan or not…"
Caine’s gaze moved to Pomni with miserable uncertainty, and she hated that part of her wanted to defend him. Not because he was right, but because she subconsciously knew he had technically done this for her. He had seen her situation and misunderstood it so completely that another version of Jax was now lying at her knees. Her feelings on the matter were still battling it out inside of her, making her feel sick to her stomach.
“We cannot just replace him,” Ragatha said, her voice soft but firm.
Caine lowered slightly from where he floated in the air. “I understand that now.”
“No,” Zooble said. “This is wrong, Caine. You can't just do things like this to learn from them. I know it's hard for you to get but…” They looked back at Jax. "Shit, man. This is so fucked."
That seemed to land. Caine looked back at Jax, then toward the tent. “Can I undo it?”
The question settled over the group feeling ugly. Undo it? Pomni supposed that was the most logical solution. Maybe, it was best to delete him before he can further develop here. But he had already opened his eyes, and he had already asked them who they were. Whatever Caine called him, Pomni could not look at him lying on the floor and pretend he was still only a file.
Pomni’s hand rested near his shoulder, not touching. “No,” she said, and the others looked at her.
“Pomni…” Ragatha said.
“I mean, I don't know,” she said. “Maybe not before we know what undoing it would actually do.”
Zooble looked at Pomni, some of the bite leaving their expression. They sighed, glancing back down at Jax with a discomfort they did not bother disguising. “I mean, he’s already here. It’d feel pretty messed up to just… kill him again.” The word again lingering in the room for a moment.
Zooble recoiled a little, their face cringing. “That's…not how I wanted to phrase that. But still.”
Caine watched them with careful attention. “Then what would you like me to do?”
Ragatha crouched beside Pomni, leaving a careful distance between herself and Jax. “We should let him wake up somewhere quieter.”
Gangle nodded quickly. “I agree.”
“With less Caine, too,” Zooble added, still irritated.
Caine’s hands folded in front of him. “That can be arranged.”
Kinger raised a finger. “And tea.”
Everyone looked at him.
He seemed surprised by his own certainty, then looked down at Jax with a small, worried frown. “People should have tea when they wake up somewhere terrible. Unless they are spies, in which case they should have tea anyway, but in a cup you can see through.”
For the first time since Pomni had stepped out of the tent, the room loosened by a fraction. Not enough to make anything okay, not nearly enough for anyone to smile, but enough that Gangle’s shoulders lowered and Ragatha’s expression softened with exhausted fondness.
“Tea sounds good,” Ragatha said.
Zooble sighed. “Has anyone seen Kinger's bucket? I think we should get his input on this anyways.”
"I can look for it," Gangle offered.
Caine lifted one hand and a portal opened near the side of the stage with none of his usual fanfare. Beyond it was a small room Pomni did not recognize, dim but not dark, furnished with a couch, a few pillows, and walls that were blessedly free of vivid colors and bright lights. It was probably the most restraint Caine had ever shown in interior design, but it was proof he had really learned what humans found to be normal.
Pomni stayed where she was for a moment as the others began to move around her. She knew they needed to get Jax off the floor before he woke up again, and she knew someone would have to decide what to tell him, what not to tell him, and how long a mercy could remain merciful before it became a disturbing lie. All of that was coming, waiting just beyond the next few minutes, but for now she only looked down at him and let the strangeness of his presence settle into her chest.
One of his ears had fallen across his face.
Pomni reached out, hesitated, then carefully brushed it aside with the backs of her fingers. It was a gesture for someone who had not even given her permission to know him, and she pulled her hand away almost as soon as she had done it, embarrassed by the tenderness of it.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly.
Ragatha glanced at her but did not comment. Instead, she rose and stepped back as Caine lifted one hand, his fingers poised in the air as though even he understood that any sudden flourish would feel obscene. The portal waited at the side of the stage, quiet and dim beyond its frame, and when Caine snapped his fingers, Jax’s unconscious body rose gently from the floor. He floated only a few feet above it, limp and weightless, his long ears hanging down as he moved toward the open doorway.
Pomni stood, watching him drift away with a hollow discomfort she had no claim to and no way to set down. Caine guided him through the portal carefully.
Ragatha followed Jax through the portal. Zooble, Gangle and Kinger left to go search for the bucket, but it kind of felt like an excuse to avoid the unexpected reunion.
Pomni followed Ragatha, glancing at the blue and purple tent once more before going through.