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Leeroy had always liked sour straws.
And he always bought them from the very same place.
The shop was called something generic. Manchester Market, maybe, or Wildwood Grocery. He'd never paid attention to the name. To him, it was just The Shop at the end of Old Manchester Road, the place where the pavement cracked and the streetlights stopped and the suburbs gave way to the slow creep of farmland and forest. It was the last building before the world turned rural, a single-wide structure with peeling white paint and a hand-painted sign that had faded to the color of old bones.
He'd been going there since he was a kid. His mother would send him with a crumpled list and exact change rubber-banded around a twenty, and he'd walk the half-mile from their house with his shoulders hunched and his head down, trying to take up as little space as possible.
The walk wasn't dangerous- Wildwood was safe, or safe enough- but there was something about the road that always made him feel exposed. Too much sky, too many windows in the houses he passed, too many chances for someone to look at him and see something he didn't want seen.
"Leeroy, walk faster, I need the milk before the news starts."
"Leeroy, for God's sake, stand up straight, you look like a question mark."
"Leeroy, don't you dare spend it on those sour straws again."
He always spent it on the sour straws anyway. Not all of it- he wasn't stupid. He'd get what was on the list first, the milk and bread and eggs and whatever else his mother had scrawled in her tight, angry handwriting, and then, with whatever change remained, he'd grab a single package from the rack near the register.
The old lady never said anything about it. She'd just ring him up with her gnarled fingers and hand him his change and say, "You tell your mama I said hello."
She had a name. He'd learned it eventually, though he couldn't remember it now- not anymore. Something old-fashioned, something that ended in -ine or -ette. Pauline? Maxine? Claudette? He'd called her ma'am for years, and she'd called him honey and sugar and that tall drink of water, and somewhere along the way, without either of them noticing, they'd become something almost like friends.
She was ancient. Or she seemed ancient to him, anyway, though she'd probably only been in her fifties when they met. And when Leeroy was a teen, her hair was already white and thin, pulled back in a bun so tight it looked painful. Her face was a roadmap of wrinkles, each line a different decade, a different story. She wore the same thing every day- a floral apron over a housedress, orthopedic shoes that squeaked on the linoleum, reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She smelled like coffee and menthol cigarettes and the particular dusty sweetness of old candy.
She'd been running that shop for thirty years, she told him once. Her husband had started it himself, and when he died- God rest his soul, the stubborn bastard- she'd just kept it going. It was hers now. The whole thing. The shelves, the register, the squeaky front door, the tiny back room with its cot and hot plate and ancient television.
She lived there, in the back. Had for years.
"That's sad," Leeroy had said then, and immediately regretted it. He'd been sixteen or so, old enough to know better than to say something like that out loud.
But to his surprise and relief, the old lady had simply laughed. "It's not sad, honey. It's mine. You'll understand when you're older."
And at twenty-two + however long it has been since he's been swallowed by this colorful, digital world- he still didn't understand.
- - -
She noticed things. That was the thing about the old lady. She noticed everything.
"You're growing your hair out," she said one afternoon when he was twenty years old. He'd come in for bread and toilet paper and a single package of sour straws, and she'd looked at him over the tops of her reading glasses with an expression he couldn't quite read.
He touched his hair self-consciously. It had been creeping past his ears for months now, curling at the nape of his neck in a way he secretly liked and publicly pretended to hate. "Uh- yeah- well. Haven't gotten around to cutting it."
"Mm-hmm." She didn't sound like she believed him. She rang up his items with those slow, deliberate movements, the ones that seemed to take forever but never felt inefficient. "My granddaughter's got hair just like that. Same color, too. A beautiful young lady."
Leeroy.. didn't know what to say to that. He'd never met his own grandparents- his mother's parents had died before he was born, and his father's parents had disconnected with the family after the divorce- and the idea of a grandmother who noticed things, who looked at him and saw something other than a disappointment, was almost physically painful to consider.
"You ever thought about growing it longer?" she asked. "Past your shoulders, maybe? You've got the face for it."
"I don't- " He stopped. Swallowed. Glared at the floor. "..No. I mean, I haven't- thought about it-"
"Well, maybe you should." She handed him his bag and his change. "Life's too short to have boring hair."
He'd thought about it, though. He'd thought about it every day for the next two years. He'd thought about it in the shower, watching the water run through the long black strands and wishing they were longer. He'd thought about it in front of the mirror, tilting his head this way and that, trying to see what she saw. He'd thought about it late at night, lying awake in his bed, listening to his mother move around the house like a restless ghost.
He never cut it shorter again. Not once.
- - -
The shop had its regulars. Leeroy knew them the way you know the background actors in a movie you've watched a hundred times- not by name, but by habit, by the shape of their presence.
There was the young mother who came in every Tuesday for diapers and cigarettes, her toddler strapped to her chest like a second skin. There was the old man who bought a single lottery ticket and a single can of beer every afternoon at four, never earlier, never later. There was the teenage girl who always paid with a crumpled ten-dollar bill and always smelled like vanilla lotion.
And there was the drunk.
Leeroy didn't know his name either, but he knew his face. Red and bloated, with broken capillaries spiderwebbing across his nose and cheeks. He came in around seven most evenings, already unsteady on his feet, and bought the cheapest vodka the shop sold. The old lady would ring him up in silence, her face carefully neutral, and the drunk would leave without incident most nights.
But not that night.
Leeroy had been eighteen, fresh off another argument with his mother- something about his posture, about the way he walked, about the way he existed in a way that seemed to offend her on a molecular level- and he'd fled to The Shop because The Shop was the only place in Wildwood that didn't feel like a trap. He'd grabbed a soda and a candy bar and, of course, a packet of sour straws- and was standing at the counter, counting out change, when the drunk stumbled through the door.
He was worse than usual. He was angry, his movements jerky and aggressive, and he started yelling before he'd even made it to the register. Something about the price of things. Something about being ripped off. Something about old hags who don't know their place.
The old lady didn't flinch. She stood behind the counter with her hands folded in front of her as always, her face as calm as still water, and said, "Sir, I'm going to need you to lower your voice."
"Don't you sir me," he had snarled. He slammed his vodka bottle down on the counter so hard the register jumped. "You think just 'cause I come in here every night you can charge me whatever you want? You think I don't notice? You think I'm stupid?"
Leeroy should have left. That would have been the smart thing to do. The sensible thing. Walk out the door, let the old lady handle it, go back to his mother's house and his mother's rules and his mother's simmering resentment.
But his legs didn't move. His hands didn't move. Something in his chest had gone very cold and very still, and his voice- his voice moved without his permission.
"Hey."
The drunk turned to look at him. His eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, and it took him a moment to locate the source of the sound. When he did, his mouth twisted into something that might have been a sneer.
"The fuck you looking at?"
Leeroy didn't answer. He just looked at the drunk with a flat, defiant expression- the same expression he'd learned to use on his mother when she got too close, when her hands lingered too long on his shoulders, when her voice went soft and wrong and she started talking about how you're the only man in my life now, Leeroy, you understand? You're all I have.
"I asked you a question," the drunk said.
"I heard you." Leeroy's voice was quiet. Calm. He didn't recognize it. "You need to leave."
"Or what?"
Leeroy considered the question. He was taller than the drunk by half a foot, he was three times slimmer, younger by thirty years, and sober besides. He could have done something.
But instead, he just kept looking. Kept his face blank. Kept his shoulders loose and his hands at his sides and waited.
The drunk held his gaze for five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. And then something in his posture changed- a shift, a recognition that this particular confrontation wasn't worth the energy it would cost- and he grabbed his bottle and muttered something under his breath and stumbled back out into the evening.
The door swung shut with a slam. The bell above it jingled. And then there was silence.
Leeroy stood there for a long moment, his heart hammering against his ribs, his palms slick with sweat. He felt strange. Unmoored. Like he'd just stepped out of his own body and was watching himself from somewhere far away.
The old lady cleared her throat. "..Well," she said. "That was something."
He looked at her. Her hands were trembling slightly- the first sign that she'd been afraid at all- but her smile was genuine, warm, grateful, when she looked back at him.
"Thank you," she said. "You didn't have to do that."
"..Yeah, well. I did." The words came out rougher than he intended. He grabbed his soda and his candy bar and the fucking packet of sour straws and shoved them into his pockets, putting down an adequate amount of change on the counter before turning. "I should go."
"Leeroy."
He stopped. He didn't turn around. But his shoulders were tense and his face was partially hidden by his hair, even as he stared down at the floor with something that wasn't quite frustration, as much as he wanted it to be just that.
"..I've known you since you were this high." Her voice was soft, almost gentle. "You've always been a good kid. Don't let anyone tell you different."
He left without responding. No, he fled.
The walk home felt longer than usual, the houses darker, the sky lower. He couldn't shake the feeling that something had shifted, that some invisible line had been crossed. He'd done something good. He'd helped someone. And now that someone might expect things from him- might want to know him, might want to get closer- and the thought made his skin crawl even as something small and lonely in his chest leaned toward the warmth.
He never talked about that night. Not to the old lady, not to anyone. The next time he came into the shop, she didn't mention it either, and he was grateful enough that he almost said thank you again. Almost.
He didn't.
- - -
The fight with his mother happened when he was freshly twenty-two. On a Tuesday. He remembered that because the trash cans were at the curb, and the recycling truck always came on Wednesdays. Small details. Useless details. The kind of details that lodged themselves in his brain like burrs and stayed there forever.
He didn't remember what started it. Something stupid, probably. Something small. He'd left his shoes in the living room, or he'd used the last of the milk, or he'd looked at her wrong- the way she always said he looked at her, like he was judging her, like he thought he was better than her, like he was just like his father.
"You think you're so special," she'd screamed at him. "You think you can just walk around here like you own the place, like I don't do everything for you, like I haven't sacrificed everything-"
He'd tuned out after that. He'd learned to tune out years ago, to let her voice wash over him like static, to nod and make the right sounds while his mind retreated to somewhere safer. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere she couldn't follow.
But then she'd said something different. Something that cut through the static like a knife.
"-And don't think I haven't noticed," she was saying, her voice lower now, meaner. "Don't think I don't see what you're doing with your hair, with your clothes, with the way you walk. You think I'm stupid? You think I don't know what you're trying to be?"
His blood went cold. He stared down at the kitchen tiles for a few seconds, eyes widening slightly. Then, slowly, he lifted his head and looked at her from beyond the curtain of his hair. Really looked at her. And saw something he'd never seen before.
Not anger, exactly. Something else. Something worse. Something that looked almost like fear- or disgust.
"You're not," she whispered, her voice tight, brows furrowed, hands clenched into fists at her sides. "You're not anything. You're just confused. You're just-"
"Stop." His voice cracked. He hadn't meant to speak. "Stop talking."
"-Just sick," she continued, like he hadn't said anything at all. Her voice breaking, throat tightening, but she continued anyway. "You need help. You need someone to fix you, and I can't- I can't do this anymore, Leeroy, I can't watch you-"
"Shut up!" He snapped without meaning to. Without wanting to say anything. Without wanting to listen, to be here-
He was shaking. His whole body was shaking, and his vision had gone blurry at the edges, and his eyes stung, and he couldn't breathe. She was still talking, still saying things, but he couldn't hear the words anymore- just the tone, the pitch, the familiar cadence of her disappointment.
And then, without warning, she stopped.
She stopped talking. Looked at him. Her mouth closed. Opened. Closed again. Her glassy eyes looked him up and down, like she didn't recognize what she was looking at.
She crossed the room in three steps and wrapped her arms around him. Pulled him close. Pressed his face into her shoulder the way she used to when he was small, when she still smelled like perfume instead of cigarettes, when her hands had been soft and warm.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, her voice shaking. "I'm sorry, baby. I didn't mean it. You know I didn't mean it."
He froze. Her body was warm against his, her arms tight around his ribs, her breath hot on his neck. It should have been comforting.
It should have been a mother's love, a mother's forgiveness, a mother's desperate attempt to hold on to something she was losing.
But it wasn't. It wasn't. It hasn't been for a long while. It was a trap. It was a cage. It was the same thing it had always been- her need dressed up as love, her loneliness wearing his mother's face.
"You're all I have," she'd said a hundred times. A thousand. It was always the same. "You're the only man in my life now. You understand? You're all I have."
Something in him snapped. Shattered. His heart jumped to his throat, choked him, made him feel dizzy, made the world spin and his legs nearly buckle beneath him. He tried to step back, but she held him tight, wouldn't let him go. His hands lifted, landed on her shoulders, trying to pry himself free, to free himself-
He pushed her. With all the force he had.
She fell backwards.
He didn't mean for her to fall. The coffee table was behind her- the one with the chipped leg, the one he'd been telling her replace for months- and when she stumbled back, her hip caught the edge and she went down in a heap of floral nightgown and tangled limbs.
She didn't get up.
For a moment, he stood there in the middle of the kitchen. He just stood there with his hands still extended, his chest heaving, his brain refusing to process what had just happened. She was on the floor. Laying oddly still. Her face partially obscured by her hair. She wasn't moving. She wasn't trying to get up. She was just.. lying there, her eyes wide and wet, her mouth slightly open.
"Get up," he wanted to say. "Get up and stop pretending. Stop making me feel guilty. You've done that enough. You've done so much worse."
He didn't say it. He couldn't. His voice had abandoned him, along with everything else- his courage, his patience, his last remaining shred of denial that his mother was anything other than what she'd always been.
He ran.
He ran out the front door, down the porch steps, across the lawn. He ran past the house with the barking dog and the house with the broken mailbox and the house where the old man sat on his porch every evening smoking a pipe. He ran until his lungs burned and his legs screamed and his vision went spotty at the edges, and even then he kept running.
He didn't look back.
He never looked back.
He never returned home.
- - -
The first few weeks of homelessness were a blur of adrenaline and shame. He slept in the abandoned minivan first- a rusted Dodge Caravan behind a shuttered strip mall, the seats moldy and the windows cracked- until someone else claimed it as their own. Then, he moved to a bridge, then a patch of woods behind a church. He learned which gas stations had bathrooms that locked and which fast food restaurants let you sit for hours without buying anything. He learned to keep his head down and his hood up and his mouth shut.
He didn't go to The Shop. Couldn't. The thought of walking through that door, of seeing the old lady's face, of having to explain where he'd been and why he looked like a skeleton wrapped in dirty clothes- it was too much.
So he stayed away. He bought his food from the grocery store two miles in the other direction, the one with the self-checkout and the security cameras and the complete absence of human warmth.
He thought about the old lady sometimes. Wondered if she noticed his absence. Wondered if she asked about him. Wondered if she'd heard what happened, if the gossip had traveled down Old Manchester Road the way gossip always did, if she knew that that tall drink of water had finally broken and run.
Probably not. Probably she was too busy running her shop, too busy counting her change and dusting her shelves and making small talk with her regulars. He was just a kid who used to buy sour straws. He wasn't important.
That's what he told himself, anyway.
- - -
The hunger got bad in the fourth month. Not the usual hunger- the low-grade, constant gnawing that had become his baseline- but something deeper. Something desperate. He'd gone three days without eating, and his body was starting to eat itself, and his thoughts were starting to go fuzzy and strange.
He found himself walking toward Old Manchester Road without consciously deciding to go there. His feet just took him, the way they always had, following a path worn smooth by twenty-two years of errands and escapes and small, secret joys.
The sun was setting when he arrived. The sky was the color of a bruise, purple and yellow and orange bleeding into each other, and the shop's sign was dark. No lights in the windows. No cars in the lot. He pressed his face to the glass and peered inside, and the shelves were shadows, and the counter was a darker shadow against the wall, and there was no sign of anyone moving in the back.
He tried the door. It was unlocked.
He should have turned around. He knew he should have turned around. But the hunger was a living thing now, a second stomach that had grown teeth, and before he knew what he was doing, his hands were already moving, already reaching, already filling his backpack with whatever they could find.
Cans. Crackers. Cheese. Oranges. Macaroni. Bread. Peanut butter.
And then, at the very bottom of the rack near the register, a single package of sour straws.
He grabbed them without thinking. Stuffed them into the bag with everything else. Zipped the zipper with shaking hands and stood up and-
The light came on in the back room. A door opened. Footsteps on linoleum.
He didn't wait to see who it was. He didn't wait to be recognized. He just turned and ran, backpack thumping against his spine, the door slamming open, the bell above it jingling like a warning.
He heard a gasp. Then-
"Thief! Someone stop him! Thief!"
Her voice followed him out into the twilight, high and startled and nothing like the warm, crinkly voice he remembered. He didn't look back. He couldn't.
He rounded a corner and almost ran directly into two police officers.
Just his fucking luck.
They were standing by their car, drinking coffee from paper cups, their flashlights clipped to their belts. They looked up when they heard the shouting, when they saw the man in the dark hoodie sprinting toward them with a bulging backpack and a face they couldn't see.
"Hey!" one of them shouted. "Stop! Police!"
Leeroy stopped.
For one long, horrible second, he stood there at the edge of the road, his chest heaving, his vision swimming, his whole body screaming at him to surrender. The officers were already moving toward him, their hands going to their belts, their mouths opening to shout more commands.
And then Leeroy looked to his left, and he saw the field.
Corn. Endless rows of corn, stretching out into the darkness like a sea of green and gold.
He didn't think about it. He just moved- veering off the road and into the stalks, the leaves slapping at his face and arms, the dirt soft and uneven beneath his feet.
"Hey! Get back here!"
The sirens started. Insistent, pulsing, red and blue light painting the corn in colors it was never meant to wear.
Leeroy ran. He ran with his backpack bouncing against his spine and his hood falling back from his face and his hair whipping into his eyes. He ran with the sound of the officers crashing through the stalks behind him, their flashlights cutting swaths through the dark, their voices calling out to him to stop, to freeze, to give up.
He didn't stop.
He ran until he couldn't feel his legs anymore. He ran until the shouts behind him grew distant and then disappeared entirely. He ran until the corn opened up into a small clearing, a patch of bare dirt surrounded by stalks on all sides, and then he couldn't run anymore.
He collapsed.
The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was the sky- pale and endless and full of stars he'd never noticed before. The last thing he heard was his own heart, pounding like a fist against a door that would never open.
And then there was nothing.
- - -
He sat in the dirt for a long time after he finished eating. The sun had climbed higher, and the heat was oppressive, and the crackers sat in his stomach like stones. He'd eaten half the sleeve and one of the oranges, and everything had tasted like nothing, and now he was full in the way that didn't matter.
He thought about the old lady. Wondered if she'd recognized him. He was wearing a hoodie- his only hoodie, black and stained and too big for him- and the lights had been off, and he'd kept his face turned away, but still.
His posture. That slight forward slump, the one his mother had always complained about, the one that made him look like a question mark. It was characteristic. It was him. If she'd seen him, really seen him, she would have known.
Please don't let her have seen me. Please don't let her know it was me.
He packed the remaining food back into his backpack. He brushed the dirt off his jeans. He stood up slowly, his joints protesting, trembling, his head light, and looked out over the cornfield. The stalks swayed in the breeze. The sky was endless and blue. Somewhere far away, a bird was singing.
He would never go back to The Shop. He knew that now. He would never see the old lady again, never hear her call him honey, never watch her hands move across the register with that slow, deliberate grace. He had taken something from her- not just the food, but something else. Something he couldn't name. Something that had been growing between them for years.
He had killed it.
He started walking. He didn't know where he was going. The cornfield stretched in every direction, endless and disorienting, and he walked anyway, one foot in front of the other, because stopping wasn't an option. Stopping meant thinking. Thinking meant remembering. And remembering meant feeling the guilt curl up in his chest like a snake and squeeze.
He looked down at his hands just once that day- and not for long.
The hands that stole. The hands that have hurt the one person in this world that was supposed to care, to love him unconditionally.
The sun beat down on his back. His hair stuck to his neck. His shadow stretched out in front of him, long and thin and crooked, and he watched it as he walked, watched the way it hunched forward even when he tried to stand up straight.
A question mark.
Yeah. That was him. A question mark with legs. A question mark that had never learned how to ask the right questions, or maybe had never wanted to hear the answers.
- - -
He never saw the old lady again. A few weeks later- or maybe a few months, time had started to lose its shape-
He put on the headset.
He wasn't in a very good state at that time- both physical and mental. The worst he's ever been, maybe. To the point that after a while, he didn't even remember the cirucumstances of his own arrival to the colorful purgatory.
All he knew is that he put the headset on, and the world dissolved into color and chaos and a voice saying Welcome to the Amazing Digital Circus!
He never found out if the old lady recognized him. He never found out, or if she stood in her shop the next day and looked at the empty space on the shelf where the sour straws used to be and wondered what kind of person would steal from her after all these years.
He wondered if his mother was okay. If she got up after he left. If she told on him. If she ever got up at all.
"I'm sorry," he thought sometimes, in the rare moments when the digital world went quiet and his mind drifted back to Missouri, back to the cornfield, back to the shop at the end of Old Manchester Road. "I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm sorry, mom. I didn't mean to steal. I was hungry. I didn't mean to push you. I didn't mean to hurt you."
But sorry didn't fill a backpack. Sorry didn't un-steal what was stolen. Sorry didn't undo the damage he did. Sorry was just a word, and words were just sounds, and sounds disappeared into the air like they'd never been there at all.
- - -
In the digital world, Leeroy became something totally different.
A purple cartoonish rabbit with a pair of long ears and a perpetually mischievous smile and a talent for making other people miserable. That's who Jax was.
In the real world, Leeroy was a ghost- a homeless kid from Wildwood, Missouri, who stole from the only person who was ever kind to him, and then disappeared into a virtual world.
The only thing that didn't really change about him- was his posture.
The fucking question mark.
Oh, the cruel irony.
A young man filled with questions that he would never get the answers to- that he didn't want to know the answers to.
He wondered sometimes if the old lady was still there. If she's still running the shop, still dusting the shelves, still calling people honey and sugar and that tall drink of water. He hopes she is.
He hopes she forgot about him.
And while all alone in his obscenely, disgustingly girly, digital room- he sometimes dreamed about the cornfield as well. The endless rows of stalks, the flashlights cutting through the dark, the sound of his own breathing ragged and desperate in his ears. The screams. The burning in his lungs. The ache in his legs.
Each time his mind would return to those moments in his sleep, he would wake up with his heart pounding and his hands shaking and no memory of where he is until the colors of the circus reminded him.
And when he looked into the mirror, he could see who he really is. A terrible person. A tall drink of water. A question mark. A thief.
Leeroy Jax.
The door hissed open as he stepped into the hallway, shoulders hunched forward, his ears drooping forward and his pupils dilated.
Get it together, he told himself. It was just a dream.
"Jax!"
The voice cut through the fog like a fist through paper. Jax's ears perked, his shoulders hiked upward, momentarily startled. He turned, and there she was- Ribbit, all long limbs and frantic energy, her amphibian eyes wide and her mouth already splitting into that ridiculous grin she got when she was about to be annoying.
She was running. Full speed, no hesitation.
"HEY, DUMB[SQUEAK]S!!!" she shouted, cut off by the censorship as always, and the sound of her voice- loud, alive, excited- to see him- hit him right in the chest where the guilt had been sitting.
And without thinking- without a single, solitary thought beyond the sudden, stupid warmth spreading through his ribs- Jax grinned. A real one. The kind he never let anyone see. His ears snapped up, his shoulders straightened, and before he knew it he was running too, charging toward her like a purple freight train, his hands already extending, palms out and flat.
"SUP MORON!!"
The hallway swallowed them both, and for one perfect, impossible second, the cornfield didn't exist. His past life didn't exist- none of it existed. Just this. Just Ribbit's stupid, shrieking laugh and the slap of their palms meeting in the middle and the small, fragile joy of not being alone.
Small joys.
Leeroy always liked sour straws.
But after becoming Jax, he grew a particular liking to hot chocolate as well.
- - -
I really liked this metaphor at the end. Leeroy's life had been like a sour straw- well. Sour. Filled with small joys, but it couldn't have been called an easy life.
But Jax, in the circus, had grew a liking to hot chocolate as well- something sweet and warm that he drank every week alongside his friends.
until the fucking idiot ruined it but its ok it didnt happen yet <3
so this has been very random and spontanous and idfk what this even is imma be real lmao i just had a sudden urge so here it is. mind you im writing this thing at 4 am so if there are any mistakes then no there arent.
i watched the finale in theaters and imma be honest, i found it lacking in a few aspects. ofc as a jax fan it gave me a LOT of food, and i realized that what i loved most about ep 9 were the flashbacks. those were absolutely amazing and diabolical at the same time knowing how it all turned out in the end but holy shit i absolutely love our lovely trio of Jax, Ribbit and Kaufmo before everything went to shit. if only that stupid fuckass rabbit could handle being vulnerable for one nanosecond ough
but coming back to my point of the finale being lacking, that mostly refers to literally anything else BESIDES Jax. so overall, this oneshot is more of a headcanon. i really hoped that we would get some lore when it comes to the fucking corn because it felt?? important?? in the way he was shown to be so disturbed by it?? i thought that it couldnt have been just the trypophobia. it had to do with something irl, something memorable and traumatic.
buuut none of that happened so here i am writing some BULLLSHIIIIT i hope yall enjoyed it lmao ough im going toslepe thump
