Chapter Text
Pomni taught herself how to endure most things. It’s how she survived the circus in the first few adventures. It’s how she’s continued to survive here.
She stares at the entrance of the purple pillow fort in the center of the common area, listening to the gargle of the abstracted as they crawl around inside. It sounds almost like a stomach. Low and churning.
It’s how she survived all of this.
She doesn’t remember the days anymore. She doesn’t remember when they all swallowed their fates here. How long they’ve lived in this quiet bliss of acceptance since the end of it all, since… Pomni places a hand against her throat… since all of this aching numbness she doesn’t really understand has taken over her small body.
They’ve done what they could’ve. Zooble’s opened up a bar at the edge of the circus. Ragatha was able to conjure up a horse similar enough to the one she had in the real world. Gangle started drawing again. Kinger can… at least kind of cook now.
Caine still makes new characters. NPC’s. Tries to keep the days less mundane. Nothing feels… right.
Pomni watches the colorful eyes of the creatures inside of the fort dart around, the gargling sounds escaping through the slight slivered opening of the curtain.
They rarely go into the tent during the day. The circus is too bright at these hours, and the light aggravates the poor things endlessly. Makes them insanely aggressive. Still, she can’t help but stand here most days. Staring. Wondering.
Pomni swallows down nothing.
“Pomni?”
Ragatha’s voice breaks through the silence. She turns her head.
“Everything okay?” she continues.
“Great,” Pomni hurries in her panicked tone. A small moment passes, Ragatha stays unmoving. She’s breaking a rule. She knows that. The whole lying thing has been banned for a while now, verbal contract. She knows it’s there for good measure. To prevent another… Pomni looks back at Ragatha, letting out an exhale. But it’s still annoying.
Pomni shrugs, being truthful, “Just thinking, is all.”
Ragatha’s eyes soften, stepping closer to her. “Hey, I’m sure it’s good news. Caine rarely ever calls for meetings. And it’s not like there’s much going on these days,” she tries, reassuringly. Pomni just blinks.
Ah… right. Caine called a meeting.
“Not even sure what bad news would look like down here now,” Pomni laughs, “Unless Gangle drew another mask for herself and completely lost it.”
Ragatha brings up a hand to cover her mouth to giggle, “I still don’t want to think about the mask she drew with no mouth.”
Pomni shivers, “Haunting.”
The ragdoll makes a movement with her hand, motioning Pomni to come with her.
Right, Caine’s meeting. Pomni turns back to the tent for a moment, the colorful glowing eyes peeking through that small sliver again. Something pinches in the inside of her chest, even though she knows she doesn’t actually have organs.
“Pomni?”
Ragatha’s voice pulls her back to the ground again. She looks away from the fort.
“Let’s go,” she calls, letting herself fall into step with her friend.
–
Caine is entirely too stiff. Stiffer than he’s ever been talking about… well, anything. Pomni sees Ragatha’s anxiety rise up in the way she pushes herself a little farther up on the couch.
“I know we don’t really… We don’t really do these gatherings like we used to,” Caine fidgets with his fingers. Pomni feels entirely too fidgety to let him dance around this. Luckily, she doesn’t have to say anything.
“What’s wrong, Caine?” Ragatha pushes.
“I’ve learned something recently,” he swallows. Or… whatever it is that makes him tense up like that, “I only do it every so often…”
“Do what so often?” Zooble pressures, the top of their eyes furrowing. The cryptic speech is starting to make something nasty crawl through Pomni’s skin.
“Scouring the internet,” Caine coughs out, “But! This time, it felt… It felt… important to do,” he takes his top hat off, flexing his fingers, “One of the abstractions had disappeared, and I didn’t want to worry anyone, so–”
Zooble continues pressing, “What do you mean one disappeared?”
Gangle places a ribbon over her mask, “They escaped the pillow fort tent?”
“Well… That’s initially what I thought.”
“Then what was your final thought–”
Voices overlap in a frenzy.
“Let me—”
“Is it rogue?”
Ragatha throws her hands up. “Guys, let’s just let him—”
“You aren't staying here.”
The room goes silent.
Caine freezes, surprised by his own words. He curls his fingers around his staff, sinking backward.
Nobody speaks.
Nobody moves.
Pomni lets out a short laugh, “What?”
Caine swallows.
“The… The people who used to work at C&A. They're dismantling the Circus.”
Another beat.
“What does that have to do with us?” Zooble asks.
Caine looks between them.
“They’re returning your memories to your hosts.”
Pomni looks to her right to find Ragatha already staring back at her. Her one eye wide, the button unmoving. Ragatha turns her head back to Caine, pushing herself off the couch slowly, Pomni only watches her.
“I… I don’t know how he exactly did it,” Caine pushes his fingers into the side of his gums where the top of his head technically is, like he’s thinking, “But Mike Dobby, Scratch’s host, the first avatar… He found his own file and put those memory structures back into his original consciousness. That’s why an abstraction disappeared. It was his.”
Caine floats lower towards them, “He wrote in this… recent article about how he originally had uploaded his brain scan to have a way for his consciousness to live on once he was diagnosed with brain cancer. But… he survived it. Wanted to know how he had lived in the digital world. He imported those memories he made in the circus and… Well, I’m not sure. He found all of your files there. He must’ve remembered everything,” Caine’s eyes shut, his voice wavering.
“Caine… What’s going to happen to us?” Ragatha asks, pushing a clothed finger against the part of her chest where her heart would be.
Caine switches his hat from one hand to another, standing straighter than he was before, “Your host will be receiving all accumulated memories from your time here. Once that integration is done, the separate identities that you… that you currently occupy will no longer be necessary.”
“So our avatars would disappear,” Ragatha tries to repeat.
“And our real bodies, they’ll… get our memories,” Zooble whispers, “And we’ll be…” they trail off, looking up at everyone else for help. Pomni can’t bring herself to open her mouth.
“We’ll be freed,” Kinger stands too, a floating hand placed against his chest, “But how did… Scratch abstracted here. How did he manage to uncorrupt his own memory files?”
Caine only stares, unsure.
“Then that would mean Kaufmo… and Ribbit… There’s a chance,” Ragatha turns back to Pomni, eyes wide. “That could mean that Jax—”
“Look, I don’t know the specifics,” Caine waves his arms around, floating, again, closer to the group. He paces. “It's only an article right now. A… lawsuit against C&A. For involuntarily taking people's brain scans and saving them digitally. I don’t know what will happen to your avatars, what will happen to your hosts, how the memories will be transferred to them when they’ve all been living normally since you’ve gotten here, what will happen to those who abstracted. I don’t know.”
“You’re not fucking with us again, are you?” Zooble’s eyes squint, a hand coming out to push Gangle behind them.
“What?” Caine slips, breathless, nearly hurt.
“Zooble, not now,” Pomni rushes. It’s the first real sentence she’s said since they’ve gathered here.
“Does no one realize how fucking crazy this sounds?!” Zooble shouts, throwing a rattling hand out at the floating mouth.
“It’s not… the most insane thing to believe,” Ragatha says, more to herself than anything, but it makes Zooble’s eye tick.
They rattle back and forth, a fight that Pomni can’t even hear anymore, because something is ringing in her body. Sometimes, she gets a phantom feeling that something’s still over her eyes, her ears, a headset she can’t pry off. It comes back full force then. She used to be a person.
Pomni pushes against her thin neck, like it might help her breathe better, like this avatar had any organs. She stares out at her gloved hands, her stout body, her weird outfit. She is a person. As much as Abigail is. At a point in time, she was Abigail. And in a bit more time, she could be her again. What did that make Pomni?
Could they really all… escape?
“Caine’s done worse, Ragatha! You can’t–”
“We’ve been here living in peace for how long!? You can’t possibly try and erase all that we’ve built here with Caine and reduce it to a lie. When would he even have had the time to be plotting something?”
Gangle’s wavering voice broke through the fight, “I agree with Ragatha–”
Pomni pushes against her closed eyelids, the voices tuning out. She accepted her fate here long ago. When Caine had first shown them their host body’s social media pages. She accepted that she’d never know anything else but the circus. That her memories were just that… memories. That she was more Pomni than she was Abigail. But if she could go back to herself…
The circus had been bearable. Learning new things, being with the others, watching the abstracted slowly calm from unpredictable creatures to slow-breathing globs. She accepted the foreverness. Like falling down an endless pit with no bottom. She accepted it all.
She feels a hand land on her shoulder before she sees it, opening her eyes to see Kinger staring at her with those same reassuring eyes he had all that time ago in the Mildenhall Manor.
Is it selfish? To suddenly push their memories into a person that unknowingly split their consciousness here? How is she supposed to suddenly accept that there was an exit for them?
Kinger’s eyes don't waver from hers, and he turns back to the group. Caine looks unsure of himself, gripping tight against his cane as he floats above the people arguing.
“This won’t get us anywhere,” he says, cutting off something Zooble was saying. Caine seems to loosen up at the silence that follows it. “If Caine is telling the truth, we should… We should say our goodbyes to this place. To each other.”
Pomni feels something sting in her eyes. How is she supposed to accept they’d all leave each other with no possible idea what would happen when they do?
She finally pushes herself off the couch, landing on shaky legs. Everyone turns towards her. “No matter what, we’re going to find each other out there,” Pomni says, sounding way more sure and solid than she feels. Ragatha looks down at nothing.
“When is this going to happen?” Zooble says, and they sound so much more exhausted than they had sounded before. Defeated.
“I’m not sure. Time doesn’t move the same here as it does out there,” Caine whispers, afraid to set off another argument. “But if I was to guess…” Caine curls his own arms around himself, “You’ve got maybe until early tomorrow morning.”
“We have one last night here?” Gangle asks, shaky. A ribbon places itself over her mask, holding it there like it was a second from cracking.
“I’m… sorry, everyone,” is all Caine has to say, sounding subdued. He disappears with a pop the next moment, leaving them dumbstruck in the couch area they used to call their spot. Though it’s been missing a person for a long, long while.
It’s almost sunset, with how the light shines through the one hole in the wall they’ve yet to patch. Zooble falls to their knees.
“How can this be possible? I don’t even… I don’t remember anything out there, it’s–”
“I’d assume our memories will be combined with the memories of our persons. They’ll just… They’ll just have these new memories,” Gangle whispers, her ribbon hands curling over each other, like she’s trying to comfort herself.
“How could I do this to them?” Zooble says instead, curling their hands around their head. “Who would ever want these memories?”
“It wasn’t all bad,” Gangle tries, getting down on her own knees to pry Zooble’s hands away with her ribbons.
“You’re right,” Zooble admits, soft at the sight they see when they finally open their eyes, “I met you.”
Gangle’s smile feels too intimate to continue staring, and Pomni has to look away to let a feeling of strange envy and shame that started in her gut dissipate.
“I’m sure our… our people will want these memories. We are them as much as they are us. We’re… We deserve that freedom too.”
Pomni hears a sniffle, and when she finally looks back, Ragatha is wiping away tears, covering her face with her forearms.
“I hate my mother more than anything in the world,” she whispers, heaving in a breath, “But I can’t help but wait to finally see her face again.”
She moves without thought, wrapping her arms around Ragatha’s waist.
“What do we do when our consciousness leaves here?” Zooble asks no one in particular, Gangle helping them up off their knees.
“We don’t know how our memories will return. Whether it’s a flood or… or if it’ll return in clumps. It could feel sudden, or like nothing at all… we’ll just… We have no way of knowing. All we can do is wait,” Kinger says.
Zooble shuts their eyes, “Then, what are we supposed to do? When these memories return… what do we do then?”
Kinger stares at the open expanse of the circus, somewhere they had all believed they’d be for the rest of forever. His response comes stilted, “We live.”
–
The group split after the sun had disappeared past the horizon. A quiet unsureness of what would happen next. Kinger and Ragatha had been deep in a conversation when Pomni last left them. Surely enough, they were reminiscing, and being there much longer than Pomni, it felt wrong to break that moment for them.
So she found herself back here. The pillow fort.
She could hear the low gargling even from here. The way the colorful eyes illuminated the darkness inside the gap of the tent. Pomni inhales slowly.
Before she even gets the chance to move again, she hears a cough behind her. Too exaggerated to be genuine.
Caine stares back at her from the air when she turns around. His feet straight and shoulders slightly hunched. She thought he wouldn’t come back after the meeting, but a small calmness overcomes her as her body settles.
“Hey Caine.”
He perks up, not expecting a soft greeting. He floats closer, “Pomni, I… I’m just doing my last rounds. Before whatever happens, happens,” Caine tries.
“How’d everyone else go?”
“Well… Zooble threw a chair at me. But ah…” Caine shrugs, “Said it was for old time’s sake. Even that I’d… I’d probably miss.”
Pomni stands straighter, staring up at a thing she had once feared her life from.
“And what would happen to you? Once we’re all gone?”
“I… Well, I suppose I don’t know,” Caine says, his voice light on his toes. It’s not something Pomni is used to hearing him sound like. “I’ll be here. Still. I’m sure.”
“I’m sorry we’re leaving you, Caine,” Pomni tries, pushing the apology through past her pride.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I wish we had some sort of choice in all this.”
“And if you did?” Caine asks, “What would you have chosen?”
Pomni knows he’s not testing her. He’s trying to prove to her too, that escape was always the only thing that they all had ever wanted, even after they accepted their fate. To be free from confined walls, voids, worlds. She doesn’t answer, and some sort of satisfaction washes over Caine’s eyes.
“This might be horrible to say in this… context,” Caine starts, rubbing a hand against his other elbow, “But I’m glad you joined the circus, Pomni.”
She smiles up at him. It feels like a joke, almost. They both know she had no choice in joining. But she gets the sentiment, the gratefulness. Strange to hear from an AI. But humans will put humanity into anything. Love, and empathy, and shame, and pride. Behind the clown body, the weird limbs, the unreal eyes, Pomni has always still been human.
“And you were a great ringmaster,” she says, swinging her arm across her chest in a fist. Another almost-joke. He spent so much of his time also trying to torture them. But at this moment, she could only see the Caine that he’d been in the last few forever. After he had come back from his “death”. His silly jokes and willingness to listen. His help in teaching them how to conjure what they wanted. Their stupid fake beach trips, trips to worlds they only had horrid memories in before, the late nights talking about his memories of the past avatars as they watched the abstractions explore the large tent entrapping them in the middle of the circus.
Pomni smiles up at him, softer than before, “You were a good friend.”
Caine only smiles back, his mouth unmoving but his eyes squinted, soft, happy.
“Well… Time to get this show off the road!” he shouts, jokingly, his usual witty tone shining through as he does a barrel roll in the sky.
“This was your host, the one and only Caine,” he sing-songs, blowing an imaginary trumpet out of the air. Pomni can’t stop herself from laughing, “And you have been a wonderful audience tonight!”
Pomni applauses, hoots and cheers that fill up the empty dark space of the Circus at night. Caine conjures up a glowing sign behind him in the air, bowing, low and long.
It feels so final. So real. Pomni feels her throat constrict around nothing.
Caine tips his hat, shutting his eyes, before he snaps his fingers down at her. With a pop, he’s gone, and she’s left alone with nothing but a path to the makeshift home for the abstracted.
The moon shines bright through the holes in the tent. It’s now or never.
The tent is darker at night. Which means it’s safer. The creatures, some sleeping soft, don’t seem to mind her ruffling feet against the pillows everyone had placed across the grounds.
Her eyes scour the place, before landing on a specific glitched creature pacing a corner of the tent. She recognizes him instantly.
Though his consciousness is long gone since the time she had first tried to reach him when he abstracted, remnants of his personality, his movements, his self, came through in the way the creature reacted to things. In the ways it moved across the floor.
She steps carefully over, sitting down on a pillow an awkward distance from the thing still pacing, moving up the walls and back down, circling nothing. Aimless. It hurts her every time coming in here.
“Hey Jax,” she starts. Loud enough to get the thing’s attention. It pauses. She can hear it in the way the weird gargling sounds of its movement seem to quiet entirely. “We’re… We’re leaving soon.”
The sound of a gargle. Then nothing. She doesn’t want to look over.
In this silence. In this quietness, she could imagine for a moment that he’s still there with them. That he’s still beside her.
It haunts her, most nights, the sound of him pleading. The sound of his last breath as he imploded in her arms, burning bright. He didn’t want to go. She should’ve stopped him the last time it looked like he wanted to say something to her. She should’ve pushed. She should’ve pried. She should’ve grabbed his arm. She should’ve. She should’ve. She should’ve.
Pomni shuts her eyes.
“I don’t know. Something about our memories being returned back to our hosts. I… don’t know how that’s going to work. I honestly feel like this is all still some weird… sick joke,” she laughs at no one, “I just… Despite everything, I can’t wait to be out of here, Jax.”
Her voice sounds tangled in itself.
“But I’m so scared,” she continues, “I spent so long accepting our life here. And now I’m just supposed to accept this? What if me and the others can’t find each other when we leave? What if we forget our names? Or our faces or…? What if our memories come back distorted and wrong? What if… what if we never see each other again?” Pomni pushes the edge of her palms into her eyes. “Jax… what if you really are gone forever?”
She pushes harder in the hopes it would stop her from feeling like she failed him, but it just makes it all so much worse. It falls silently, and she swipes her gloves across her eyes, still refusing to look to the left of her where the creature must be just standing and watching, with those colorful, horrid eyes that feel enchanting and haunting all at once.
Something washes over her. A determination she can’t understand, can’t place. Pomni stands then, wiping her sleeves on her puffed pants.
“No,” she says to no one, “You know what?”
Despite her fears, she turns to her left, making eye contact with the thing, all of it’s fucking pupils.
“If… If Scratch somehow got his memories back even though he abstracted, then there’s no way you’re trapped here forever too,” she says, pointing at the thing. It’s bad to rile them up. She knows that. But the abstracted just looks at her finger, going cross-eyed, before all the eyes go back to looking at her face.
“And when I do find you again, which I will,” she swears, “I’m going to beat you up for everything, and it will hurt and it will bruise because we’ll have actual real blood, and we’ll have actual real skin, and actual real organs, and… And you will take it, because I’m going to get you back for all the hell you put me through,” she pushes out the words, and it almost hurts. It hurts to talk so definitively, but knowing that this was all a maybe.
“And you’re going to… And we’ll…” she pauses, watching the way the eyes pulse with color. So different. So gone.
Pomni drops her hand, “We’ll talk about everything… and I’ll finally get the chance to know you, Jax,” she says, her voice tuning to a whisper.
The abstraction only stares, mindless, memoryless.
And maybe it’s because it’s her last night there. Maybe because she doesn’t care, Pomni steps forward, closer than she’s ever been since that first time in the hallway.
When the thing stays staring, quiet, non-aggressive, Pomni brings a hand out and presses it against where Jax’s heart would be if the monster was still him. Her fingers glitch, her body aches from the pain. She doesn’t care.
“I’ll meet you again, okay? And I’m going to yell at you, and check in on you, over and over until you get sick of me,” she mutters. “And I won’t… ever let you walk away from us again.”
Pomni whispers, eyes stinging. She leans forward, her forehead hitting the monster. The abstractions are not exactly solid, and if she was any less careful, she’d slip right through it and glitch so hard she’d want to die just to end the pain.
But here, in this limbo. With the glitching of her body. With the static making her joints twitch…
The creature is also not moving, like it could somehow understand her.
… too numb to care. Too unsure of the future to move away. A calmness sweeps over her.
She stands there for as long as she could bring herself to.
When Pomni falls asleep that night, still glitching, a bright pang hits her in the center of her chest. Maybe it was supposed to hurt, maybe it was supposed to be agonizing, like a bomb going off in your stomach. But before she could feel anything, before she could even sense that she just woke up from her sleep. A ringing sounds over her ears, and her body goes completely static, a tingling sensation so intense it burns.
It lasts for only a moment, before all her consciousness goes out in a flash.
Abigail Brooks fucking hates her job.
Well… to be fair. It was entirely common in her line of work. Corporate accounting has a way of absolutely sucking the soul out of you. She swears she can hear the clicking of computers, filers and printers, calculators and the tapping of anxious feet, just… everything in her sleep. Like tinnitus but for loser adults.
Which she is. Sort of. She’d rather die than admit that though.
And, in all fairness, her job’s been a whole lot harder after one of the nights she came back from her last urban explorations.
She blames it on the fact she slammed her head into a pole trying to climb out of the abandoned factory, but she knows it must’ve been something else.
It was sudden, a spark of a feeling that was almost like a needle prodding around in her brain. It burned her head so bad it felt like her body had been lit on fire, like all of her nerves suddenly snapped in half.
She nearly doubled over and passed out in the middle of the forest. If it wasn’t for the maybe like… five viewers on her stream that were so worried for her they were about to call the cops, she wouldn’t have forced herself to stand back up and tell them she was fine. Like hell she was going to let them call the cops.
She’s already doing something illegal by trespassing anyway.
Maybe it’s a brain tumor. Abby thinks, clicking into another file on her computer. The office is extra slow today, like someone’s throwing a prank by fucking with the clock above her cubicle. She swears every minute feels like an hour. She blinks blearily.
A brain tumor. Yeah. With how she’s been taking care of herself lately, she wouldn’t be that surprised. Nothing really… felt all that surprising anymore.
It started slowly after that night she felt the burning. The flashes. The dreams. Her brain feels like there’s a chunk missing from it and it’s getting to her more than she cares to admit. It was so… sudden. So random. It’s gotta be a brain tumor.
She doesn’t have that much time to dwell on it either. She’s got bills to pay. Jobs to work. People to see. She’s… She’s fine.
A flash passes through her head again, ringing her ears to the point she has to slam her hands down on her keyboard to try and redirect her pain sensors somewhere else. She opens her mouth. A silent scream, standing up from her chair and stumbling backwards from the desk in a blinding wave of gray and fluorescent light. A voice sounds out from the inside of her ears. Muffled and distorted.
“--let's skip this one! And also make–” Static. “–a vegan for the rest of the da–”
Abby knocks over her own chair the moment she nearly trips over it, slapping a hand over her ears in some unhelpful attempt to save herself from the pain.
It’s over before she can even make sense of it.
Her vision returns slow, white dots flickering before it numbs out to nothing. She can’t hear any typing around her, the office more quiet than she’s ever heard it. You could hear a pin drop.
Everyone’s staring at her.
“Uh,” she starts, trying to center her mind. Before she can think of another idea, she fake yawns, stretching so artificially it makes herself cringe, “Phew! Almost fell asleep at the desk!” she says, plastering on a fake smile. Some people give her a sneer, mumbling to themselves before the typing on the desks continue.
Abby stands there for another second. Two. And then she’s dashing to the coffee machine on the opposite end of the office building.
Okay, maybe she should go to a doctor. That’s definitely not normal. Voices and bright flashes and horrible pain in her head… That’s… That’s not a normal thing to just start having out of nowhere. Definitely not.
Her feet are faster than her mind, and she nearly trips over herself again before she slams open the door to where the coffee machine would be.
She braces her hands against the sink of the office kitchen, breathing hard.
What even was that voice? Who’s voice was that? The glitching sound almost felt like a censor. For what? A name? And what was that thing about being vegan?
“Vegan…” she says aloud, just to test that her nerves were still intact. Her tongue feels like sand.
“Vegan? Oh, nah, this is whole milk.”
Abby straightens up at the new voice, turning her head to the right slowly. A guy is standing there, a steady stream of milk from a carton going into his cup.
“They probably have almond milk in the fridge though,” he continues, throwing the empty carton across the room. It misses the trash by a margin, crashing into the glass door before falling on the tiled ground. Abby just stares. He picks at something in his teeth, before going to sip his drink. “Sorry, were you not talking to me?”
They stare at each other for a long while, the sipping of his coffee so loud against the dripping of the sink and the ticking of the clock that Abby genuinely thinks she’s lost her fucking mind.
“Who the hell are you?” she asks.
“New guy,” he says, smug, leaning his frame back against the table. “Name’s Brandy. Look, I just got my badge–” he’s pulling at his lanyard before her patience runs incredibly thin and then she’s yanking the cup of coffee he just made from his hands.
“Don’t fucking care,” she chugs the whole thing in a go, throwing it into the trashcan, and kicking the empty milk carton out of the way to get out of the door.
“Wait, that was whole milk! I thought you were vegan!”
The door shuts before she could hear anything else.
Fuck, Abigail hates her job.
–
She churns the voice in her head till the end of the workday. The rasp, the lowness, the… familiarity. It was the first time she’s heard a voice during the flashes. It was the first time the flashes felt less… health centered, and more like her body was trying to tell her something.
The moment it’s 5PM, she’s already out the door before someone could stop and invite her to happy hour.
Alcohol sounds like a bad idea these days. Like she’d go even more insane than she already feels. Her dreams feel longer than ever. Like the moment she wakes up, it’s like she hasn’t slept at all. It’s fucking with her consciousness, her job, her everything. She doesn’t even know what she’s dreaming about. Her recollection comes in colors. Red and blue. Purple and yellow. Red and white.
Her walk back to her apartment feels like seven years long. That’s another thing. Her time perception has been getting worse. Seconds feel like minutes. Hours feel like days–
She stops walking, pressing her fingers hard into the center of her closed eyes. Like it would help. Like it would do anything.
She breathes slowly. Inhale. Exhale. The pavement pushes back against her feet as hard as she presses down on it. Grounding. Real–
It feels almost stupid, trying and trying and trying to ignore the bustle of the city, of her mind. The car honks. The yelling. The ads from the big TV’s plastered against the skyscrapers. The sound of phone’s ringing and heeled footsteps–
Through it all, Abby hears a soft melody break through. A piano.
She opens her eyes, the sun flooding in and blinding her for a moment before her ears focus back in too. The song feels familiar, the way a distant lullaby feels familiar to someone old enough to be in hospice. Abby blinks, people now staring at her as they pass by for the strange way she’s standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk, hands clamped tight around her bag strap.
She thinks about it for another second, and then lets herself follow the music. Usually, she wouldn’t care. She really wouldn’t. Mostly because she’d rather go home than be outside for another second more. Mostly because she really just… doesn’t care about most things like she used to.
But maybe it’s the fact she feels like she’s any other second away from having a flash so painful she could just pass out and die, maybe because a part of her is in desperate need of something to surprise her: she finds her way to an open expanse of cobble. It’s a park she’s only visited a handful of times since she moved to her new job. Mostly to people watch than anything.
A public piano has been placed near the center of the path, already graffiti’d and half ruined at the feet. She could assume a dog chewed through them all. A dog, right now, actually, is being pulled by its owner, fighting against the leash to get to the piano.
She steps closer, cautious with no real reason, the melody still continuing, like the person playing sees nothing else but the object in front of them.
The melody gets louder in her ears. Familiar… wrong. She hears humming in the inside of her ear again, a distant ringing. Her temples seem to sting like her head was being compressed horizontally. She braces herself.
The flash hits differently this time.
“You’re just gonna hide in your room?!--”
Abby slams her hands over her ears, nearly feeling her legs give out. She can’t see. Holy hell, she can’t feel anything–
A flash of color passes by all the white that’s clouded her vision. Pink, red, orange. They look like walls. Like… Like a–
“Are– are you two seriously gonna start singing th–!!”
More voices. That one sounded the same as it did this morning. That low rasp. Abby feels herself take another step back, the sun feels burning against the back of her neck when it’s fucking the end of November. It shouldn’t–
“All for the love of y–”
A snippet of a song. Abby hears her voice. What the fuck is happening? She slaps herself across the ear, acting like it would help dislodge the… the whatever–
There’s another voice. So familiar. So…
More colors flash by. Purple. That fucking purple. Why can’t she–
“Wait!”
“Trust me partner, I got this!”
It’s her own voice again. She’s never said that before in her life–
The flash stops so suddenly that the loss of pain makes her knees give out, her vision returning back too fast to let her mind process anything. She lands on her knees and palms, scraping it against the cobblestone. Her skin burns as she heaves. Her work bag slides a couple feet from her.
“--Ma’am?”
“Oh my god, is she okay?”
When her eyes refocus, she sees a handful of legs crowding around her. Someone kneels.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
She looks up, the strangers blurry in her daze. They’re asking more questions, hands over their mouths. A dog licks at her elbow. She can’t do this. Her hearing’s so fuzzy.
“Yes. Yes, I’m okay. Thank you,” she hurries, rushing to stand. Some of them seem to still be worried but she can’t handle this right now. Her mind's already overflowing with things she can’t comprehend. She picks up her work bag, heavy in her arms, and tries to ignore the onslaught of “are you sure"s. The person at the piano is still sitting there, staring at the keys.
The sweater looks so familiar. That shade of stubborn pink. She’s seen that color before. Somewhere… Where?
She grabs the top of the piano, using it to keep herself from falling again. When she looks up at the person sitting there…
An old man stares back at her, seemingly tired, unphased.
Nothing familiar. Nothing that triggers anything.
She blinks. Something shoots past her gut. A disappointment she doesn’t understand. The old man doesn’t say anything, just stares forward at her unseemingly. The silence feels killer, and the fuzziness in her ears have come to an unbearingly awkward halt.
“What song was that?” she asks instead. At least something to break the silence.
“You kids and your lackingness,” the old man spits, rolling his eyes. He presses down a note, bitter, and for a moment, she really thinks he’s going to ignore her.
She’s about to turn when he opens his mouth again. “Daisy Bell,” he names. “It’s a classic.”
Of course she knows what the song is. It’s a song everyone has heard at least once. A part of her just hoped… hearing an answer would help her recall the memory she’s so desperate to find.
“Thank you,” she lets out, barely a whisper. Nothing answered. Then she’s turning back towards her walk home, her mind roaring at her.
—
Weird ringing and hearing voices in head
Flash of light and ringing ears
Weird memories coming in flashes
Voices inside ear and flash in sight and weird dreams
The searches do nothing. In the darkness of her apartment, Abby just sighs. More articles about how she should go to a doctor and how she’s probably going to die in a year, more articles about simulation conspiracies. It’s not what she's looking for.
She swallows, closing her laptop to be met with the complete blackness of her small studio apartment.
Then what is she looking for?
It’s like a part of her is waiting for her to reach a conclusion, a thought, something she doesn’t even know. The uncertainty of it makes her feet go cold. November was about to end, and something about the winter time made a sinking feeling settle in Abby’s gut.
She could almost hear the typing of keyboards again in the silence, save for the heater plugged in at the corner of her kitchen. That weird feeling in her gut returns. A type of dread she can’t pinpoint, like a part of her is trying to fight its way to the surface. She’s endured most things in her life. Her shitty job. Her strained relationship with her parents. Her undetermined future. Her self-hatred. Her… loneliness.
Abby puts a hand on the center of her throat, feeling the way her throat pushes back when she breathes.
Despite everything–
Her head leans back. The darkness of her ceiling seems to stretch on for miles.
She just wants to be okay.
-
The beginning of December is colder than how she’s ever remembered it.
It’s been a week since her worst flash at the public piano. But the flashes are even more common now. Though they hurt less. She still can’t make out faces, can’t remember names, but it’s like… like her mind’s taking over itself.
Sometimes she does things just to see if it’ll trigger a flash. It’s horrific most of the time, but a part of her needs it. To hear those voices again, see those colors again. A part of her longs for it. How do you miss something you don’t even know?
Maybe there really is something wrong with her, but she does it all anyway, like she’s staring down the barrel of a gun.
Every responsibility she has feels more weighted than it's ever been. It takes her forever to do anything. Even when it’s something as important to her survival as grocery shopping.
The Walmart is eerily quiet for 7PM on a Saturday. She knocks a bag of oranges into an empty cart. Her mind’s a wreck these days.
The lack of windows, the gray walls, the metal shelves, something about the place makes her feel uneasy. She’s never felt this way here before all this.
She pushes her way past an employee unloading a rack of clothes so vibrant it could make a kid nauseous. A hanger nearly whacks her in the face, and she dodges sideways clumsily.
A flurry of red and blue swings past her.
The flash happens in an instant.
Blue.
Red.
“Let’s just try to calm down. Everything’s gonna be okay, new stu–”
Fuck, what the–
“I’m sorry!” the employee shouts, putting a hand out towards her in an attempt at an apology. Her vision returns in a swirl of fluorescent lights and flashing blue.
Abby quickly shakes her head, a small sign to show she was fine even though her heart’s beating out of her chest. What the hell? What even triggered that?
She scans what’s in front of her again, and her vision locks on the scarf hanging from the employee’s hands. Striped blue and red. Something about it makes her head spin. There’s a pressure against her temples again, a crushing sensation in the back of her head. She shuts her eyes and braces herself.
… The flash never comes.
The lady is looking at her cautiously when Abby opens her eyes.
“Can I… Can I help you with something?”
The scarf seems to focus itself in her vision behind the woman’s head. A grief so deep and sincere swirls in the base of her throat. The confusion about it all is so fucking trust rating. It only makes her heart ache more.
“How much for the scarf?” she asks instead.
The lady turns her head to look at what Abby’s staring at.
“12,” she states, still looking a little worried for her.
Abby’s never the type to make a purchase like this, but with the numbness in her hands, the slight pressure still on her temple, she doesn’t say anything else and reaches out to snatch it from her.
–
She ties the red and blue scarf tight around herself as the automatic sliding doors of the store open to the coldness of the city at night. It curls around her mouth, and she can see the colors peeking out from the bottom of her vision. Her heart pumps, aching still.
There’s no way to even describe the feeling, even when she starts walking with nothing but a bag of oranges in her hand. It’s like… something like a tangled ball of squiggly lines in the inside of her esophagus, like choking on a hairball, like her mind is trying to tell her something she just can’t reach.
She needs to punch something. She hates feeling like this. Like she’s missing something. In all honesty, it’s how she’s almost always felt. Growing up the way she did. Mostly alone, just staying in her corners. Even the way she’s been living up til now, in and out of the office, the attempts at feeling more sneaking into abandoned structures, the empty nights and awkward outings with her coworkers that just can’t seem to get the hint she’s a bore to have around.
It’s like she’s always been lacking something in her. Whatever would make her… better than all of this.
The cold burns her eyes and she digs her face lower into the scarf until her nose is engulfed too. The scarf smells entirely too new, a less endearing version of a new car smell. It itches her nostrils.
This feeling feels different though. Less like she was missing something internally and more that she was missing something bigger, a huge chunk of her own identity, a chunk of her own emotions that meant something more than anything ever has. It was stupid to say it that way, but she doesn’t know how else to describe it. All she truly knows is that she wants it all to stop. Abby shuts her eyes tight, the cold still stinging it hard enough that her tears feel like ice is forming over.
A pressure burns at her temples again, making her scalp burn red hot, before she can even brace herself for it, her vision whites out.
“I know how it can feel in this cir—”
Abby stumbles, clutching at her head.
A voice she recognizes from her past flashes feels so different now. He sounds almost lucid. Real.
“Sometimes it just all feels,” a bated breath, “--pointless.”
The burning gets worse. It’s so… dark in this vision. She sees purple for a moment, black dots on white-- The flash pushes her vision back to nothingness and Abby feels herself fall forward from the shaking in her brain. Her palms scrape on cement. Her knees feel like they’re bleeding through her work pants. Fuck–
“But it’s not. Not if you have people who care about you. Good memories can do a lot, hold onto that, and cherish the people—”
Abby sees the outline of a house, standing tall in dark wood.
“—you never know when they’ll be gone–”
Something worse than Abby’s other flashes seem to center itself in her chest. A grief so strong she feels she could die from it. Her vision returns for just a moment while the ringing in her ears is endless. She sees her scarf in her sight, unraveled from her neck from how she hit the ground. It laid so peacefully against the sheet of frost–
Her vision blanks back to white, and a needle picks through her brain. Abby lets out a grunt, pulling at her hair. The same voice from before comes back
“--in this world… the worst thing you can do is make someone think they’re not wanted or loved.”
Stop. Stop. Please just make this stop.
“I’m glad you’re here with me.” It’s Abby’s own voice. She’s never had this conversation. She hasn’t. Abby begs to nothing, pleads to whoever might be out there–
Her world tilts in another minute, because someone kicks her so hard on the side of her back that she rolls over from her position on the sidewalk. Her vision comes back like someone just slapped her across the face with cold water
Laying flat on a dirty city sidewalk sounds like a mess in itself, feels even worse, in all honesty. Her oranges roll out of her bag, and she grips the side of her head to steady herself.
The guy that just tripped over her is already trying to stand. His moves languid.
She’s still struggling to see but she pushes herself to sit up. Abby doesn’t expect an apology, or an “are you okay”, she honestly doesn’t expect anything. Still, the last thing she does expect to come out of this guy’s mouth is—
“What the fuck,” the guy spits, stumbling. He rubs at his knees where he landed. “Why the fuck are you on all fours on the sidewalk? Jesus—”
Despite the flash she just had, Abby suddenly feels a white hot anger shoot through her chest. It almost feels familiar.
Before she can even respond, the white hot anger turns into complete white static running through her body instead.
“—is this one of your NPCs or is this a new sucker? 'Cause if it's a new character, we're gonna have to re-do the whole theme song—”
It’s over before she can even process it. She’s grabbing at her head again. That voice… The guy is just staring at her, eyebrows furrowed.
Why did his voice…
“Are you on drugs?” he dead-pans.
The question snaps something. The strange feeling vanishes as quickly as it came to her, drowned out by a surge of annoyance.
“My fucking bad, man,” Abby bites, pulling her scarf tighter around her so it doesn’t drag against the ground anymore, pushing herself to stand up even though she feels light-headed.
The guy scoffs, pupils peering through the top of his eyes. The blackness of them sends a short pinch through the center of her spine. Finally standing face to face, she cranes her neck up. This guy’s tall.
“Yeah, you sound real sorry.”
He bends down to pick up at the things he dropped.
… Abby squints, staring at the way his neck bends, the movement of his head as he speaks. Why does it…
“Can you move?” he says, not even looking up at her.
The thought vanishes. Just like that. She’s going to kill this guy. Fuck the fact that he looks like a mess already. She curls her face, clearly pissed, There’s not an ounce of an apology in his eyes.
Okay… she’s not a monster. At least not always. She’s just angry. And her head hurts and.. Or at least—
“Look, ya’ caught me at a bad time,” he says, like that would help with his attitude problem. She should probably be on her way now. He turns, pulling tighter at his jacket. She can’t look away from the fact the zipper’s broken, it falls loose the moment he pulls it.
“Just… can you piss off?” He says such a rude sentence so naturally. It ticks Abby off more. She should really be on her way now.
“What the hell is your problem?” she spits, he spins his head up from where he’s picking up his stuff from the ground, slightly covered from the thin line of frost. He’s not wearing gloves, his fingers are shaking. Abby hates how observant she’s being.
Still, he glares like they haven’t just met a minute ago.
“Lady, did I not just tell you that you caught me at a bad time?”
“Well, you also caught me at a bad time, so here we are,” Abby snips, crossing her arms.
He just rolls his eyes, finally picking up the last of his belongings on the ground: a pair of beat up sneakers that he shoves into his one small plastic bag. She really, really should be on her way now.
“Do you just argue with every homeless person on the street? Or is it my lucky day?” he says, sarcastic. There’s a smile forming through his teeth, something that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
… It feels…
She shakes her head, snapping herself from the thought. “And do you just step on every person you see on the street?” she sneers back. Fuck, wait, did he just say he was homeless? Why is she being such a–
“Look, I could do this all fucking day if you really wanted to. But I’d rather not,” he says, throwing a hand down at the ground, flat. “I’m sorry I tripped over you.”
It’s the most genuine thing she’s heard from him. His voice still has that same infliction though. Still sounds like it could be similar to the fuzzy voices in her head. It hurts trying to recall it.
She should really get going now. He pulls his jacket tight again, like it would help when the zipper’s broken. When he looks up, Abby still standing in the exact same spot staring at him, he furrows his brows.
His hair is exceptionally black, definitely dyed, like he dipped his head in the night sky. They nearly cover his eyes. With the slight frost in the winter night, white clings against it in small specks.
Abby should seriously, seriously get going–
He still stares, confused, neck craned, “Uh. Are you okay?”
“What’s your name?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your name,” she repeats, still staring at the way snow clung to his hair. She’s truly lost her mind. Maybe from the flashes that she still thinks could be a brain tumor. Maybe this was just always how insane she was meant to be. Abby doesn’t know.
“What. Is this some kind of compensation for your actions or…” the guy laughs, twirling his hands around in confusion. The uncomfortableness shines through his posture. Damn, the guy was lanky.
She doesn’t even argue that she technically didn’t even do anything. That he tripped over her. All she does is stare.
When Abby doesn’t answer, he opens his mouth and then shuts it again. Leaving more time for awkwardness to slip into the cracks of silence.
“Leeroy,” he says, entirely too stilted.
Abby waits, staring directly at him. His voice triggering a flash back then must’ve meant something. It must’ve.
No matter how long she stands there, her mind remains still. Not even a buzzing. Leeroy stands there just as awkwardly.
Just to break the quiet, she inhales. “Abigail,” she says quietly.
“Uh,” he looks around, like someone would be able to nod along with him to how strange she’s being, “You’re… a strange person, Abigail.”
She stands, waiting. For a flash. For anything. Any answer she could possibly pull for any of this. She’s so tired of not knowing. Not understanding. Please.
When the silence stretches too far and wide, Abby pushes her fingers into her back pockets to quell her increasing hopelessness that’s pulling at her chest.
“Nice to meet you,” she rushes. Her eyes sting as she looks down at nothing. The cold makes it feel like there’s ice crusting over her pupils, and she inhales to try and stop herself from crying. Why the fuck is she tearing up?
She really should get going now.
And finally, finally listening to her own consciousness, Abby turns the way back towards her apartment, her short steps quickening to get away from it all.
A part of her hopes a flash would come back. That, maybe, that stupid guy would call after her. Give her answers for all this emptiness she can’t explain inside her own body.
He doesn't.
Abby keeps walking.
Halfway back to her apartment, she realizes she forgot about her oranges
Her tears come out blocky. She swipes the sleeve of her puffer across her eyes and exhales a puff of fog. The scarf is still at the bottom of her vision.
Maybe she should go see a doctor. Or maybe she'd learn to live with this.
Abigail has taught herself how to endure most things, after all.
She can learn how to endure this too.