Chapter Text
Moving Jax to the tent had been a group decision, which was maybe the most surprising thing about it. Pomni wasn't sure what she'd expected when she brought it up- pushback, probably, or the particular flavor of silence that meant everyone was thinking the same uncomfortable thing and waiting for someone else to say it first. It had been a week after everything, after the collapse. In that time, a lot has changed, especially after Jax's abstraction. Jax had been loose in the corridors long enough that it had stopped feeling like a temporary problem and started feeling like a permanent condition, and something about that shift- the quiet normalization of it- had been what finally made Pomni say something out loud.
She'd brought it up in the common room, which in retrospect had not been the ideal setting. Gangle had gone very still. Ragatha had looked at her hands. Zooble had said, "Sounds good to me," in a tone that was harder to read than it sounded, and Kinger had nodded in the slow, deliberate way he did when he was making sure the nod meant what he wanted it to mean. It hadn't been enthusiastic, exactly. It had been the consensus of people who were tired in the specific way that only comes from being scared for a long time.
At first, they had built it themselves, or at least Pomni and Kinger had. The rest of the group was still figuring out how to create things in this digital world, but they did what the could. It wasn’t perfect, in fact, it was far from perfect. But it worked. At the very least, Jax was calm and contained in the tent. But when Caine returned from the void, he offered to help them. At first everyone was hesitant, including Pomni, so she decided to decline his offer for now. However, after another week had passed, Pomni decided it needed some fixing up.
So she had gone to Caine. That in itself had required a particular flavor of bravery, because going to Caine for anything still felt like asking a storm for directions. He was different now- she knew that, technically, in the same way you know something is safe to touch before your hand is willing to believe it. He listened more. He smiled less automatically. When she'd knocked on the frame of his doorway and he'd looked up, there had been a moment where his expression arranged itself into something that was not a performance at all, and that had unsettled her more than his showmanship ever had, because at least the showmanship she could read.
She had explained the tent idea in as few words as possible- contained space, no light source, somewhere cozy with many pillows- and Caine had listened with his hands folded and his expression careful and when she'd finished he'd said, "Yes. Of course. That's a very good idea, Pomni," in a voice that had no flourish in it whatsoever, and she had nodded and left before he could say anything else, because kindness from Caine still made the back of her neck prickle in a way she hadn't yet figured out how to explain. He was genuine, she knew, but it still felt strange knowing how cruel he had been not too long ago.
He'd had it ready within the hour. The tent was now slightly larger and it had, from some previous adventure she could barely remember, housed a collection of oversized carnival prizes. The inside was lined with something that absorbed light rather than reflected it, so that even during the bright, sourceless afternoon of the circus the interior stayed close and dim. Darkness, they'd discovered thanks to Kinger, kept the creature calmer. It moved less. The sounds it made settled into something low and rhythmic that was almost, in the most generous interpretation, like breathing. Almost.
She stood outside the tent flap now in the full wash of mid-afternoon while the rest of the circus moved through its pale imitation of a normal day behind her. Ragatha's voice carried from somewhere to her left- that particular brightness she deployed like a tool, steady and warm and working slightly too hard. Somewhere further off, the metallic shuffle of Zooble rearranging things in their room came and went in bursts, the way it had been doing for days, as though the right configuration of themselves might make the whole circus feel less tilted.
Pomni's hand rested on the tent flap. She had not moved it for approximately two minutes. You've seen him, she reminded herself. You've seen him like this. It's not the first time.
That was technically true. She'd seen him in the corridors in those early hours before the tent existed, seen the shape of him altered and moving wrong, seen the thing that wore his silhouette like an ill-fitted costume. She'd been the one to suggest the tent precisely because she'd been able to look at it long enough to think practically, which was either a sign of composure or the early stages of something she wasn't going to examine right now.
She pushed through the flap.
The dark came first- that specific, muffled quality of a space that had been made for quiet on purpose. Her eyes adjusted in slow increments. The tent was large enough that the far wall faded rather than ended, and the ground was cushioned, but bare except for the pillows Caine had placed along the left side at her request, a low pile of them that she'd told herself was practical and not at all the kind of thing a person did when they were thinking of staying a while. The creature stayed in the center.
It didn't look at her when she entered. It didn't look at anything. It simply existed in the particular heavy stillness that Pomni had come to understand, by now, was as calm as it got. She stood at the entrance for a moment longer.
“Hey,” she whispered, immediately felt ridiculous, and stepped further in.
The visits had started the day after the tent went up.
Ragatha had gone first- of course she had, because Ragatha went first at things that required a specific type of courage, the soft and steady kind that pressed forward not because it wasn't scary, but because she had decided the fear wasn't the point. Pomni had watched her disappear through the tent flap in the morning with a small covered basket that probably contained something baked. Recently, she had begun to bake with Kinger in her free time as Caine had made them a kitchen. Ragatha sometimes expressed difficult emotions through baking with a consistency that had become one of the circus's few reliable constants. It was nice, and at least she was coping better than Pomni has been.
Ragatha stayed inside the tent for about twenty minutes. When she came back out, her smile was still in place but her eyes were doing something complicated, and she'd said, "He seems calm. I think he knows I was there," with the particular conviction of someone who needed that to be true. Pomni had nodded. She had not pointed out that there was no evidence of this. He was abstracted, it was impossible that he’d recognized her. But that wasn't what the moment wanted, so Pomni stayed silent.
Kinger had gone the following afternoon, quietly and without announcement. Pomni had noticed only because she'd been nearby when he slipped through the flap- no fanfare, no explanation, just Kinger making his way toward something difficult with the particular patience of a person who'd outlasted worse. He'd stayed for about an hour. When he came back out, he'd sat on the nearest flat surface and folded his hands in his lap and looked at the middle distance for a while in silence. Pomni hadn't asked what happened, nor did he tell.
Gangle had tried. That was the important part, Pomni thought. She had tried. She'd stood outside the tent flap for a long time first, long enough that Pomni had quietly found a reason to be nearby just in case, and when she'd finally pushed through, her ribbon hands had been doing that anxious fidgeting thing, the one that happened when her feelings got too large for her frame. She'd been inside for maybe five minutes before she came back out with her comedy mask cracked straight down the center and her hands pressed to her face, and she'd said "I can't, I'm sorry, I can't," in a voice that had no performance in it at all, and Pomni had steered her gently toward the common room where Zooble comforted her as Pomni told her it was fine, which it was, and that trying was enough, which it also was.
Zooble had not gone to visit Jax. Pomni knew better than to push it. She'd brought it up once, carefully, in the way you approach things with Zooble when you want them to actually consider it rather than shut the conversation down by sheer force of personality. Zooble had looked at her sideways, and considered it for a second. “We’re in this together, but I’ll go visit when he apologizes to Gangle for what he did to her," in a tone that was doing a lot of work to sound like annoyance and not like the thing underneath annoyance, and Pomni had replied, "Doesn’t seem like that will happen," and left it at that. That seemed to be their point though, so Pomni didn’t see any reason to insist they visit.
She understood it, actually. There was a specific kind of anger that came from watching someone who was awful to you and your loved ones self-destruct at a moment when you couldn't afford the weight of their destruction, when you'd needed them to hold it together and they hadn't and now you were supposed to- what, exactly? Feel bad for them? Pomni understood that anger. She just thought, privately, that it tended to outlast its usefulness. But she had not said that to Zooble, because there are things that need to be arrived at and cannot be delivered. Maybe they will come around eventually, she thought quietly.
She settled herself on the pillows now, drawing her knees up to her chest, and looked at the creature in the center of the tent. In the dim light it was easier, somehow. The jagged, rough edges of the creature softened in the dark, became something closer to a silhouette, and a silhouette she could work with. Being near him made her chest do the specific thing it had been doing every time she looked at him since he abstracted: tighten without warning and leave little room for breathing.
She had not come with a plan. She had told herself, walking over, that this was just a check-in. That it was the responsible thing to do, the practical thing. Someone should be keeping an eye on him. The problem was that Kinger was busy patching parts of the circus, Gangle couldn't manage to face Jax, Zooble wouldn't, and Ragatha was already doing so much of the emotional infrastructure of this circus that asking her to carry this too seemed unkind. It was simply Pomni's turn. It was logistics.
Sureee, said some honest part of her. You know why you’re here. She told it to be quiet, and shook her head. Suddenly feeling a little embarrassed, she cleared her throat.
"Hey," she said to the silhouette of what was left of Jax. The word still came out smaller than she'd intended, swallowed almost immediately by the dark. The creature didn't move. She hadn't expected it to.
"Sooooo," she continued, because silence in a dark tent with a thing that used to be a person felt like something that needed to be filled. "This is weird. I want to just… put that on record. This is genuinely, objectively, very weird, and I feel like you would appreciate me acknowledging that."
Nothing. The breathing-adjacent sound continued its low rhythm. Pomni exhaled. "Okayyy. Not sure what I expected." Her mouth made a straight line. Pomni sighed as she lay down next to the creature.
“Sooo… how’ya doing?” Pomni asked sort of comically. No response, of course. She nodded after a moment, as if he had replied. “Good? Good. How am I? I’m doing awesomeeee, thanks for asking.” She laughed sort of sadly at her own joke. She wished he’d reply, even if it was just to poke fun of her for acting and looking so pathetic. But he never did.
She sat with it for a while. The sounds of the circus filtered through faintly and the tent held its particular quality of separate, of removed. It felt like a place outside of the normal hours of the circus, subject to different rules.
After a while she started talking, or rather yapping. Not about anything specifically, just about the day, in the way you summarize a day to someone you're comfortable with, the small complaints and small observations that don't require a response. She told him about how they found out their names- their real ones. She told him about Gangle's new comic, which was exactly what you’d expect, filled with anime and romance, and all the fluff Jax hated. She told him about Caine, carefully, the strange persistent niceness of him, the way it kept landing wrong no matter how many times she reminded herself that he'd meant it.
"He keeps doing things," she said. "Nice things. Normal things. Did you know he writes fanfiction now? Like on Ao3." She paused and giggled a little at the absurdity of the situation. It was hard to believe just a short while ago, he had been torturing them for his own entertainment. "I don't know what to do with that. I want to trust him now and I also- I don't know. Old habits. I’m sure you’d have something to say about it if you were here."
The creature was still. Pomni looked at it- really looked, the way she usually didn't let herself- and noticed, for the first time or perhaps the first time she was willing to register it, that it had gone particularly motionless since she'd started talking. Not the motionlessness of something that had stopped functioning. Something else. Something that had, in its way, oriented.
She stared. It couldn't be attention. She knew enough about abstraction, or thought she did, to know that it couldn't be attention. There was nothing behind the shape in front of her that could organize itself into the deliberate act of listening. And yet…
"Jax?" she said, quietly, without meaning to. The creature's outline shifted- the smallest possible movement, a degree or two, barely enough to name- in the direction of her voice. The breath left her body in a way that had nothing to do with her lungs.
She sat very still. She did not move toward it. She did not move away. She simply stayed where she was on the pillows with her knees drawn up and her hands pressed flat against the fabric, and she looked at the shape of him in the dark, and she thought- with a clarity that felt like a bruise.
You're still in there, a part of her said. The other quickly shut it down. Logically, she knew he wasn’t there, and so she pushed the thought down, swallowed sharply, and cleared her throat.
“Nevermind…”
Pomni lay there next to him for a while, just listening to the sound of her chest rising and falling as the time passed.
When she finally stood to leave, almost two later, she paused at the tent flap and looked back one more time. The creature had not moved again. It sat in its corner with the dim light just touching its outline, motionless, as large and strange and wrong as it always was.
"I'll be back tomorrow," she told it. She had not planned to say that.
She stepped through the flap and back into the bright sourceless light of the circus, and behind her the tent held its quiet, and the sound that was almost breathing continued its low, patient rhythm, and did not stop until well after her footsteps had faded.