Chapter Text
“You’re not supposed to miss me.”
“YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LOVE ME!”
“I don’t wanna go…”
I startle awake, heart racing, like when you have those falling-endlessly dreams. But this dream was nothing like that. And you’d think after having it for nights on end I’d be used to it. But every time, it just gets worse.
I don’t know why I even sleep anymore. Maybe because everyone does, to try to feel normal—to stay connected to our humanity.
I hop out of bed and stretch, trying to shake the guilt out of me. Hopefully I don’t look as horrible as I feel. I decide it’s too early to care, but not early enough to try to sleep a bit longer. I take a deep breath and head out to breakfast.
“Good morning, Pomni! I’ve been teaching Caine my famous French toast recipe, wanna try some?” Ragatha says with her usual bright tone.
Caine floats over with a plate of—actually good-looking French toast?
“Wow guys, this looks—” I close my eyes and do a smell test, just to be sure, “—and smells amazing!”
I bite my tongue, not wanting to say anything else that could imply Caine isn’t the most reliable cook. I take what I hope doesn’t look like, but definitely is, a cautious bite. Turns out my eyes don’t deceive me.
“So Ragatha? How’d you man—” I stop myself. I glance over at Caine and see he has the most hopeful puppy-dog face I’ve seen yet. “What’s the recipe? It’s better than any French toast I remember having Out There.”
“Oh! I didn’t expect it to be that good! I use sweet cream instead of milk and sugar! It makes it thicker and, depending on the kind you use, you won’t even have to add sugar since it’ll be sweet enough from the cream!” She beamed at me.
“Oh wow, I never thought of that, it’s a total game changer!” I couldn’t help but smile back at her.
“Thanks! I made it up all by myself. It was one of the only breakfasts that could put a smile on my face, no matter what else was going on.” Her smile just barely faltered at that, but very quickly recovered.
Ragatha’s bright mood and delicious breakfast took me out of my downer mood. For the most part, anyways. Which is good. I didn’t want to trouble anyone after all the craziness we are still recovering from.
Especially Ragatha. Even though we had a really nice bonding moment while Caine was gone, we kinda just fell back into the rhythm we had before. I haven’t told her about what I saw inside Jax’s abstraction. I think that she's acting normal about Jax only to everyone’s faces. She hasn’t gone to visit the abstracted aquarium at all since we built it. Even when we were building it, she avoided it. I don’t want to make her play the therapist friend anymore, so I’ve been waiting to see if she will come to me first—
“Oh, French toast! What a great start to an even better day!” Kinger came into the dining area.
Even though Caine removed the block on his memories, Kinger is still a bit kooky, but he’s now got this stoic side. It’s almost a bit intimidating, as if all his years in the circus caught up to him when Caine removed the block.
I know he also lost someone in here. His wife, Queenie. I keep wondering if I should ask him about it, about how he copes with losing her. I don’t even know exactly why she abstracted. Did they have a fight? Is it a sensitive subject for him? I figure they’re on good terms now, but still. Is his mental state even stable enough to try to talk to him about any of it? I wonder—
“—right, Pomni?”
I snap out of my daze and swallow the bite of toast I was taking way too long to finish. “Uh, sorry, what did you say?”
Ragatha looks at me with concern creeping into her gaze. “I was just telling Kinger about how you’re our first taste tester, and how you seem to be really enjoying it…”
“Oh! Yeah! It’s super good, Kinger. Best French toast I’ve ever had!”
Everyone just awkwardly stares at each other for a moment too long.
“Well then, I’ll take some! Extra whipped cream and powdered sugar, please!” Kinger says, saving us from the ever-growing awkward silence.
He sits down next to me in his usual spot. Usually, I have Kinger on my right, and Ragatha sits at my left. Gangle sits to Ragatha’s left, and Zooble sits next to Gangle. That left an empty seat in between Zooble and Kinger.
I silently wondered if it was meant for Jax.
But one day Zooble asked Caine to join us during a game of Uno, and then to breakfast the next morning. And the next thing we knew, the chair became Caine’s. I’m happy he’s become a part of our weird digital family, but sometimes it reminds me of the member we lost.
Soon after, Caine asked to help make the breakfasts. So now we all take turns in the morning teaching him how to make our favorite foods from Out There. Hence the French toast. Which has been the first truly successful attempt, and I’m not surprised it was Ragatha who pulled it off.
“I smell cinnamon, and… nutmeg?” Zooble saunters in with Gangle at their side.
“Wow, good nose, Zooble! You caught one of my secret ingredients before you even tasted it! Here, dress it up however you like!” Ragatha slides two plates in front of them once they sit down, and quickly brings over the toppings.
They both dress up their French toast and take a bite. Both of their eyes go comically wide nearly immediately.
“Oh my gosh, Ragatha! These are so good! What are the other special ingredients?” Gangle exclaims as she drizzles more syrup on her slices.
“Sweet cream! I use it to replace the milk and sugar. Also just a pinch of salt—it brings out the other flavors and balances them all nicely,” Ragatha says while she sets the larger plate with the extra slices in the middle of the table.
Everyone continues with the morning small talk while I try to just focus on finishing my plate. They mostly discuss what new additions could be made to the circus and what activities they were thinking of doing today.
I, however, have my own plans.
After breakfast, I go down to visit the abstracted aquarium. It’s peaceful there; all the abstracted seem happy. It’s the only way we could make their fate more bearable. I’m not at all surprised to see Kinger down here as well. He likes to visit his wife every morning after breakfast. He likes to tell her all about us, the new circus members she never got to meet, and give her updates on the new circus life we all live.
Without them.
I try to come in quietly, as he’s in the middle of explaining the breakfast success today, but he notices me.
“Hey, Pomni! I’ve barely seen you down here since we built this place!” He smiles at me. But then his face turns a bit worried, as if reading my mind and seeing all the darkness I’ve been shielding from the others. “Are you doing alright? Do you wanna talk about it?”
He turns and faces me with his whole body, and Queenie also turns her gaze to me. Her eyes are soft, and I can see the motherly warmth I always assumed she had through the abstraction.
Well, I hadn’t exactly planned what to say yet, but since he asked, everything just started flowing out of me.
I’ve been having… well, dreams. I mean, I’d call them nightmares, but they aren’t scary, just sad.” I pause and collect myself, feeling the all too familiar anxiety and guilt creep in.
He watches, saying nothing, but has that soft, “I’m listening,” look on his face.
“They’re of what I saw when I tried to… save… Jax, from his abstraction. Mostly just what he said to me. I just feel so guilty. For not being able to bring him back. For not digging harder and helping him before he abstracted. I just got so caught up in trying to rebuild the circus with you, I forgot that I needed to help everyone—to be the friend everyone needed, like you said.”
I feel the tears coming, but I don’t stop.
“I failed him. I was the last person he even tried to open up to, and I stupidly assumed he’d come to me. If I had only known about him and Ribbit, I would have pushed harder—”
I choke on an upcoming sob, and I am shocked to feel Kinger pull me to him, but I let it happen.
“Pomni, don’t blame yourself. I never meant to put any pressure on you with what I said. He could have saved himself just as much as you could have saved him. You can’t be held responsible for something you couldn’t have known about, let alone prevented.” I pull away and he looks me in the face.
“I just wonder—” I pause, wiping my eyes, “—if I could have saved him. From the abstraction, I mean. I felt so close. If he hadn’t have stepped on that flashbang grenade, or if y’all hadn’t have pulled me out—”
Kinger stops me and shakes his head. “It was too risky, being in there in the first place. We didn’t have Caine to fix you, and you could have ended up abstracting yourself if you were in there much longer.” He gives me a soft smile.
“Abstraction has always been a very foreign thing. We don’t know exactly how or why it happens. All we know is that they can be dangerous. But now we have something that works. They get to live peacefully.” He pauses, looking a bit distant and sad. “However, I understand wanting to bring him back. I feel the same with my wife. She’s truly my other half.”
He looks back over to the glass wall. As if she heard every word, she does a figure-eight and gives us a slow blink, as if agreeing with him.
“Kinger—what if we could bring them back? What if we just try? We have Caine; he can pull me out and fix me if it gets too risky,” I say, 100% expecting him to say no immediately.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he puts a hand on his chin, looking down like he’s deep in thought.
“…Kinger?”
“Actually…” he says before looking up at me. “I might have an idea.”