Chapter Text
He wanted the pain to end.
When it came down to it, that was at the heart of it all.
He wanted the pain to end.
The first time he had almost abstracted, the day of the beach episode, he had felt so peaceful. It was such a relief. All the anger, the guilt, the shame that he had carried for so long – he had shed it in his bedroom like an old skin, and drifted forward feeling light and free.
And then Pomni had burst into his mind against his will and ruined it all. As usual.
So was it any surprise she had managed to ruin the second time as well?
The honest truth was that Jax had barely been able to cope from the moment he arrived at the Circus. Ribbit and Kaufmo were the only reason he had managed to hang on in the beginning. With them, things hadn't been so bad. And then, all at once, they were worse than he could have ever imagined.
And who was to blame?
He had no illusions about that anymore. There was no point to self-deception in this place. Not when self-reflection was the only thing left in his world.
The ironic thing was, Ribbit was the first real friend Jax had ever had in his life. Sure, he had buddies in the outside world, people he would hang out with after school to play video games or watch TV. And he had considered those people his friends at the time. Until he met Ribbit. Meeting Ribbit taught him what a real friendship was supposed to feel like. In this digital hell where everything was fake, Ribbit was the most real connection he had ever had.
And then she was gone. That real connection was gone. And the only way to cope was to pretend that nothing had ever been real to begin with.
It had worked for a time. Disassociation was a tried and true strategy for Jax, almost comforting in its familiarity. It wasn't hard to fall back on it when things got rough. He had fallen into his own delusion so hard that at some point, believing in it had stopped being a choice. And it was all going fine until – want to take a guess?
That's right: It was all going fine until a bright, colorful, maniacal little jester with no boundaries crashed into his life and ruined everything.
Even now, stuck in eternal darkness, when the worst thing that possibly could happen to him already had, Jax was afraid to approach the memory of the day Kinger told them about C&A. He had gotten his skin ripped off twice, and the first time was Kinger's doing. As he listened to Kinger's story, the realization crashed into him without warning and without mercy: This was real.
The Circus was real.
It wasn't a dream, or a hallucination, or a silly cartoon he had fallen asleep watching. This was really happening to him. It was happening to everyone around him. And if the Circus was real, and all the people in it were real, then the things that happened to them were real. At least, they had real consequences, a real emotional impact that lasted and left scars. And isn't that the same as being real to begin with? All of the physical and emotional torture he'd gone through since entering the Circus had actually happened to him.
And that wasn't even close to the worst of it.
If the Circus was real, and the people in it were real, and the things that happened to them were real, then …. that meant everything that Jax had done was real, too. All the hurt he had caused. All the cruel things he had done for the sake of the bit. It was all real. It meant something. It had caused actual harm to actual human beings.
It had caused his best friend to abstract.
If the Circus was real, then Jax really was a monster.
You could say that was the real moment Jax abstracted. It had happened way before Caine completely lost it, and before Kinger made that monumental screw up that left them all hopeless and stranded in a dead world. No, he had abstracted in the moment he realized that everything was real. The fact that his physical abstraction had happened weeks later was just logistics.
When they learned they were all just brain scans, that there was genuinely no hope of ever leaving the Circus, that it was physically impossible to return to the real world, it almost hit as background noise for Jax. Which was funny, because you would think that it would have reinforced his beliefs. They weren't human beings. They were just brain scans of human beings. But by the time that information bomb dropped in their midst, irreparable damage was already done to Jax's system for coping. They might not have physical bodies, but the harm he had caused still mattered.
He was still a monster.
Just like his mother had always said, and he had always tried to deny, although secretly he had always known it was true.
Everything else was background noise to that. Even as he watched the others come out of their shell shock one by one, as he sat back and observed them coming together to rebuild life and hope, all he could think of was the enormity of his own failure. It was all that mattered now. It was in every waking moment, every thought, every breath. It figuratively consumed him. Until the day it literally consumed him.
And so he had given in and let go. Because he wanted it all to stop. The Circus's newfound quiet and peace, so seemingly soothing to the others, was agony to him. With no more colors and jokes and adventures to fill up every sense, the only thing left inside Jax's head was Jax himself. And it was a nightmare.
After all, who would want to be locked up in a cage with the likes of him?
Not Ribbit, that's for sure.
Should it have been any surprise that Pomni crashed into his pity party and messed that up too?
Jax still had no idea how she did it. Abstraction was supposed to be permanent and absolute. It wasn't supposed to be a place. It was supposed to be a state of being. How had Pomni managed to worm her way in?
But she had, and he'd felt it the moment she entered. He could do nothing but watch helplessly as she moved through door after door, broke down one barrier after another, pushed her way past every obstacle his subconscious mind tried to throw at her. He'd watched – humiliated and defeated – as she bore witness to the most private, personal, shameful thoughts and feelings inside him. Finally, against all odds, she'd managed to break all the way through. To this space. The black space.
And Jax was furious with her.
His pain was supposed to be over now. That was the whole point of abstraction. What happened to all that tranquility from the first time? He'd finally gone through with his abstraction, but there was no peace to be had for him now. Rather than freeing him, this dark void had become his own personal echo chamber of pain and guilt. And now, on top of all that, he had been forced to rewatch the worst moments of his life with an uninvited guest along for the ride.
Knowing that Pomni now knew the truth about him might have been the most painful part of this whole experience. But in a way, it was also a relief. The secret of what he'd done, which he'd locked so tight inside his ribs that it left no room for a heartbeat, was now out in the open. He could let go of its hold. The damage was done. She knew now. All that was left was for her to pronounce judgment and condemn him for the vile person he knew himself to be.
So he braced himself, and he waited. He couldn't look her in the eye.
But she didn't condemn him. Not even when he challenged, demanded, then begged her to. In typical Pomni fashion, she balled her fists, screwed up her face in determination, and stomped one pointy foot in front of the other, until she was close enough to bludgeon him with her affection.
Her hug felt like an assault. He didn't want it to stop.
“Why didn't you just talk to me, man?”
No. He refused to accept her words. Because if he allowed himself to believe them, that would be implying that she still cared about him – at least, cared enough about him that she didn't want to see him hurt. And that didn't make any sense. Not coming from Pomni, the Pomni who had just seen firsthand all the reasons she shouldn't care about him.
Why was she trying so hard? Why did she want to save him? Didn't she understand that he was doing this as a gift to them all? Abstraction was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person in the Circus, and he had invited it on himself. It was what he deserved. This was how it had to be. Why couldn't she see that? Why couldn't she just let go?
Maybe the real question was: why couldn't he let go?
He was hugging her back.
The gentle pressure of her arms around his shoulders, her weight leaning against him, was like a balm to Jax's disintegrating heart. An involuntary response, he felt every muscle in his body go limp. For one flashing, blissful second, the solidity of her comfort took the pain away.
And then his eyes snapped open.
Like he'd stuck a fork into a power socket, panic seized every muscle in his body. The realization crashed into him without warning and without mercy: He didn't want to go.
He didn't want to go.
What happened after that was a blur. He could still hear Pomni's voice, still sense her presence near him, but he could no longer understand what she was saying. Then her determined arms, the last two things tethering him to life, were violently ripped away. A white hot flash of pain erupted from Jax's core, spreading out to every piece of him. His mouth – did he even have a mouth anymore? - was open, trying to scream, but no sound was coming out.
And then it was all black.
For the first time, Jax could sense that was finally, truly alone. He was the last living thing in his universe. And would he even be that for much longer?
Everything else was gone. Even the red streetlamp that had been over his head. There was no sound, no up or down, no sense of time passing, no sense of the world flowing past his skin, no sense of self. No air was passing through his lungs. He couldn't feel himself blinking.
Numb. Black. Silence.
And the pain.
With everything else gone, the only sensation left was the pain. It was no longer just a part of Jax's world. It was the entirety of it. If he still had eyes, he would have started crying.
He wanted the pain to end.