Chapter Text
She’s lost count of how many times she’s been in this hallway.
When everything gets bright—Jax heating up in her arms as she shakes and starts to cry—it cuts itself short and she lands right back here. Staring down all five doors, doodles of his face in cyan and yellow crowned by soft pink light and all.
She groans and pulls her hands over her face, laughing dryly as she drags the blue and red gloves down to her neck, where they go limp and fall to her sides. She can’t do it again. Well, she can — and she will, no matter how many times it might take — but fuck does it feel like if she has to do this again she’s going to abstract herself.
She takes a deep breath. Don’t say things like that.
Onto the first door.
Pomnis learned, at her however-many-nth time in this hallway: the room with all the versions of Jax won’t open until she’s opened all the other doors, excluding the one with the chains and panels. That one doesn’t open at all. She would know—considering one time, she came back and was so frustrated she spent what felt like hours trying to pull it open in hopes of a different ending.
Of course, it didn’t work. Of course, she still found herself back at the end of the hallway. Staring down every iteration of Jax’s door-logo thing. Whatever it’s called.
So she opens the first door — thin pink circles reverberating up the walls from where she stepped. It’s the same. It’s always the same. Jax is standing there — watching Ragathas door with nothing behind his eyes. She sees it the way you would a movie, and when it cuts to be in line with his face, though it’s been blank every other time, this time she could swear his eyes just feel like he’s laughing at her.
She’d take that. She’d rather him laugh at this point. Do something that isn’t listen to the fake-version of her beg him to take her help before lunging to choke her. By the time his hands are tigthened around her neck, and Pomni is watching her own face contort and turn blue, she’s been watching long enough to slam the door.
She practically flies by the next door and swings it open. The copy of her in this scenario always comes at the exact same time. Jax and Gangle, no matter how their absurd conversation has grown utterly unfazing for Pomni, move the exact same. Smile or, in Gangles case, loom over the floor blankly, the same. It’s like watching her favorite movie again—but she’s seen it almost hundreds of times. When Jax throws the key to Gangle, she knows she’s been watching long enough, and slams the door again. This time, she slams the door so hard the small pink rings flow out of the door frame as everything shakes a bit.
Then it’s a distorted Zooble and a wonky Jax, encased by warped walls and cartoony music. It reminds her, very distantly, of something she did—or maybe watched—as a kid, but she can’t remember what it was. She can never bring herself to ned this one early, because as strange and uncomfortable it is, he’s smiling. He looks like he’s having something akin to fun—and the antic he’s re-enacted millions of times, every time Pomni throws this door open with increasing desperation, is something Pomni could swear Jax would enjoy doing. Maybe he wouldn’t. But he’d find the entire scene that plays when the door opens funny—and Pomni wants nothing more than for him to act like himself at this point. Jax is smiling, and he looks so much like himself Pomni wishes she it was possible to stick her hands through and pull him out, as he sticks his head through a circular frame and calls her a freak before the door slams on its own. OUT TO LUNCH.
One time, she re-opened the door just to see the entire scene play out again. And again. And again. She’s seen this door the most out of all of them — or, well, all except one.
She throws open the last door — glosses over the rendition of Daisy Bell floating through the room and guns straight for the table that the three versions of Jax are sitting around.
She slams her hands down on the table. “Where is he?” — and when she asks, she sounds exasperated.
“How the hell’d you get in here?” The maid swings his—her?—head to the side, almost bored in the way she moves to juxtapose the way she sneers. “We ha—“
“Yeah!” She shouts, whipping her head to be greeted by the maids cat-like eyes as it grins at her. “I know!— I— I know. But that wasn’t my question.”
The Jax with the bent ear snickers, cards hitting the tabletop softly as he rears back. “Do you think you’ll really get anywhere asking questions like that? Ha!”
“Oh, come on,” she mutters. She’s not as bothered as she knows she sounds as she pulls back from the table. She knows every time, a different one of the four has the key to the last door, and she knows she needs to convince them to give it to her so they can puff into smoke and she can go actually see Jax. She hopes this time, the one playing the piano has the key, because that one has the decency to hand it to her before vanishing.
“I need to get into that—“ she points to the door next to the piano, the only one with a correctly colored rendition of Jax to boast on the front, “—door. I know one of you has the key so will you please just help me out here and—“
“Why should we help you?” The one in the middle of the table says. It’s impossible to tell where he’s looking with how wide his pupils are, engulfing the majority of his otherwise yellow eyes, but Pomni assumes he’s not even looking at her with how he shuffles his cards around as he asks.
She scoffs. Not to be mean, really, she’s just this bewildered at the question. And a bit fed up, sure, but mainly surprised.
“Maybe we should help her!” The one playing the piano pipes up to the group, hands still as he smiles at them.
“You know, if you have to say we should help her, it makes it seem like it’s probably not a good idea.”
The one in the middle of the table grabs the bottle of seemingly-beer the maid was drinking, and hoists it into the air like he has every other time, before chucking it at the one playing piano.
“Yeah, just shut up and play!” He spits. And, like he has every other time, Jax goes right back to playing.
She watches them all for a moment, before answering the prior question.
“Because—“ she draws her hands up, grabbing at the air in shock, “—because, if I can just get through that door then maybe I can help you guys. You can’t.. you can’t really want this for yourselves.”
This gets the entire table to burst into noise. Overlapping laughter and jeering from the maid and cartoon, and some dullly snide comment Pomni can’t hear clearly over their laughter from the one with the large eyes. She groans again as they all — or really, just the maids comment about something “gay” ends and the cartoon stops giggling — quiet down.
Or they quiet down for split second, before right on cue, the sealed off door rattles and they all shoot up to scream at it to “SHUT UP!”
And then they’re drawn right back into their cards.
“Come on, guys, please!” She puts her head in her hands as she looks back up at the ceiling. There’s a green overhead light, but the actual light leaving it is seemingly white. “I know one of you has the key. I’ll leave you alone if you just,” she motions something in the air, “you know, hand it over?”
“Even if I did have the key, I wouldn’t give it to you. You women need to learn to quit—“
Pomni lunges at her, to a resounding laugh from cartoon Jax and a gasp from the one playing piano. Silence from the one who actually does all the choking. The maids chair clatters to the ground as she sputters for air — Pomni on her knees, with her hands around her neck — and just as quickly as Pomni launched toward her, she’s gone into a puff of smoke. No key left — so she didn’t have it.
She heaves, shaking a bit as she catches her digital breath and stares at the empty floor beneath her before she whips around to look up at the one in the middle of the table. He’s just staring down at her, eyes wide as usual — but before she can move to test him for the key next, he vanishes the same way the maid did.
The one playing piano starts to ask something about what she’s doing — but then he’s gone too, music and all as the chains around his ankles hit the ground with a soft click.
So only one can have it. She scrambles to her feet and stares at the cartoon — his eyes turned downward goofily as he seems to be, suddenly, very interested in his cards. A small pink tongue sticks out of his downturned mouth as he ponders the cards. Cards that Pomni knows are blank.
“I’ll.. come back to finish the game with you if you give me the key.” She walks slowly over to him, and he doesn’t react to her. “Please?” Her voice softens up just a bit as she holds her hand out.
He looks up at her, bent ear bouncing slightly as he grins and peers at her head-on. There’s a pause, before he blows a raspberry and laughs to himself about nothing as he reaches for the key and holds drops it into her hand.
“Killing off the comic relief character is such a drag!” He cries, throwing his hands up in mock-despair before promptly vanishing into smoke.
Pomni looks at the key. It looks the same as it has every time. Every time she’s done this, she tries to psych herself up for actually talking to Jax. Trying to somehow, someway, reverse or undo or take back whatever caused all of this.
She pushes the middle chair out of the way and crouches under the table, tracing her eyes up from the bottom of the table leg to the underside of the tabletop. There’s a bunch of tally marks — five-hundred and fifty six, to be exact—and she adds one more with the bottom tooth of the key.
Five hundred and fifty seven.