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It'd be inaccurate to say that Pomni gave up.
Giving up felt concrete. Factual. Something you did purposefully, with feeling.
Pomni never really had any hope of saving Jax in the first place. When she'd cornered him, hulking polygons and pulsating eyes — when she shot out the lights with cartoonish accuracy and blasé confidence just like he'd taught her to — she didn't have a full plan. She knew two things: darkness calmed Abstractions, and Jax needed to be calmed.
Then he’d been calmed. Beautiful and terrifying, a kaleidoscope representative of the human soul, the most bare-bones essence of person-hood. Of, somewhere, somehow, him. Kinger’s words came to her mind— calm enough to touch, one last time— and suddenly, impulsively, stupidly, she’d had her arms full of Abstraction. Suddenly, wildly, impossibly, she was inside his mind. Learning everything and understanding basically nothing.
You weren’t supposed to love me.
Pomni hadn’t realized she loved him. But he was right.
There’s no coming back from this.
He was right again.
She never really thought otherwise. But she could still hope, just a little bit, that if she held on tight enough, said the right things now, she could do something.
Too little, too late.
She visited him everyday. Not truly, not in his mind— she was terrified to try, to fail, or worse perhaps, to succeed— but she sat in his tent. Regaled him with whatever adventure they did that day, thought of ways he would’ve acted. She imagined a Jax that was just the same, but learned to let people in just a little bit. He was still snarky, still had all his bite, but knew when to redirect. Where the lines were, and how to skate them rather than cross them. In her fantasies, Gangle’s mask never broke, but him and Zooble still drove each other mad.
But she never gave up, because she never hoped. She didn’t tell him things so he’d be caught up, ready to fit right in when he got back. She could tell that’s what Ragatha thought of her habits, from the worried looks she shot Pomni whenever she stepped out of the tent. But it wasn’t so. She just… Wanted to tell him. Wanted him to know.
She visits the aquarium too. Introduces herself to the Abstractions that get close. She does it every time, for a few months, until she’s pretty sure each of them must have heard her introduction at least once. They’re hard to tell apart. But some of them have quirks, quirks that she starts to assign to different circus members.
There’s one Abstraction that, without a doubt, is Queenie. She hovers whenever Kinger is in the aquarium, which is often, traverses in long sweeping movements. On the off chance that Kinger isn’t there, she hovers around a cluster of a few other Abstractions, which Pomni thinks might be the original development team. She can’t really tell them all apart from each other, as none of them tend to separate for very long. There’s one that moves quite slow, which might be Scratch, and another that moves like an inchworm rather than a squid, which could be Wormo. (She had to ask Kinger three times to figure out Wormo’s name.) Otherwise, she has no possible clue.
Then there’s the two other Abstractions, Kaufmo and Ribbit. Thinking back on Jax’s memories, it’s easier to tell them apart. Ribbit is high-energy, zippy in a way, tending to greet just about anyone to enter the aquarium and hover for quite some time. Kaufmo follows her, a lazy tail. But he swims in an almost decorative way, despite his speed, like he’s trying to show off.
(She’d told her observations only to Kinger, who’d nodded along. She thinks the rest of them would call her crazy. She might be— at minimum, she’s anthropomorphizing to a large degree.)
But it isn’t like she thinks they’ll come back.
(She thinks of her grandma. Who’d close her eyes and face the wind whenever it was strong. Then she’d huff a laugh and say my hair look that bad, dear?)
(Her grandpa died before Pomni had ever been born, but a part of him lived on in the wind and rain and her grandma’s jokes.)
She thinks the problem is she never articulated it to herself. Never sat in a mirror and told herself they’re gone. They’re really gone. He’s really gone.
She finds herself staring at a dress. Part of the new circus rules were that they had the freedom to dress however they’d like. Their default avatar states still existed, and if Caine ever needed to heal them or otherwise reset their state then that’s how they’d return to, but they were free to mix it up as they pleased.
Pomni had wanted something nice. On instinct, she’d made a dress. A standard little black dress, nothing special or frilly, just a closet staple. According to her mother at least, who’d frequently lecture her in all things women’s fashion. Then she’d actually remembered her preferences, her love of pants and suits and more masculine clothing, frowned, and tossed it aside.
Unbidden, a thought comes to her. Jax never got a little black dress. It’s a staple.
She pauses, eyes snapping back to the dress. It takes her a moment to parse through her own mind, to figure out why she’d even thought of that.
(Ribbit putting the bow on Jax, his body language smoothing out into something so soft and sweet that Pomni hadn’t been sure she was reading it right. But she was, and she was stupid, because she'd never articulated the why of it all.)
She picks up the dress again, still frowning. Gosh. She was so dumb. She knew in the moment what it meant, but then in the whirlwind afterwards— pushing Ribbit away, pushing everyone away, self-suppression so strong that Pomni felt it even as a spectator, then finding Jax him(?)self in his(?) mind— she’d just forgotten.
She thinks about Leeroy Mateo.
They didn’t have any social media themself. They look androgynous, but it’s pretty impossible to tell, and their friends hadn’t posted anything about their gender or pronouns the last time that Caine journeyed out into the void to find a WiFi signal. She can’t use them as a metric of what Jax would’ve been.
But it feels weird, now that she’s aware and thinking about it, to call Jax masculine pronouns. They(?) never said, in Pomni’s romp in their mind, what they(???) actually thought of their gender. They must have some sort of thoughts, something to have told their mom, but without any elaboration, all Pomni can do is speculate.
Speculating feels wrong. Assuming there was nothing at all feels worse. She feels like she’s stuck in… transgender limbo. She’s not even trans, she has no clue what to think here.
The answer clicks for her, but for a second she’s at war with herself. Jax would hate her for ever telling anybody.
Jax is gone.
He’ll never hate her again. All she can do is try to understand him better.
(He’s not a puzzle to solve, just a book written in a language that she wants to learn.)
Pomni sighs. This is gonna be so awkward.
She approaches Zooble’s door. Raises a fist to knock, frowns, lowers it. As quietly as she can, she presses a non-existent ear to the door. She hears the quiet clattering of Zooble moving around, but no chatter or… Anything else. Okay. Good.
She knocks.
A few seconds later, Zooble opens the door. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Hiii, Zooble,” Pomni starts, an awkward grin already plastered to her face. “Would you be down to have a… Weird conversation?”
Zooble sighs. “Look, if it’s about the noise, I’m sorry. I already talked to Ragatha—”
“Oh! No, no, no—” Please do NOT talk to me about the noise, “It’s about something else. Um. Full disclosure, it’s about gender stuff? Because you’re…”
“Genderqueer.” Zooble seems to instinctively fill in the blank for Pomni, but then her eyebrows raise. “Wait, seriously?”
“If— If it’s a bad time right now, or if you don’t want to—”
“No, no, come in.” Zooble’s voice gets noticeably gentler, in a way that makes Pomni feel REALLY bad. But she follows Zooble in, and twiddles her thumbs as they close the door behind her. “Did you like… Finally figure out the transmasc thing?”
“No, um— Wait, what?”
They have a long second of eye contact, before Pomni breaks it to dart her eyes around the room.
“Uh.” Zooble clears his throat. “Never-mind. What’re you asking about?”
“Oh. Um,” Pomni files that away for later. “It’s… Not about me, actually.”
Zooble crosses their arms, a frown distinct on their face despite a lack of mouth. Really, it’s quite impressive how expressive Kinger and them can be sometimes. “Pomni… That’s sweet, but you should really let people figure it out themselves…? Unless someone asked you to come to me, which I can only imagine would be Ragatha. Tell her I don’t bite, really. Despite what noises Gangle makes.”
Oh my God can we all shut up about the noises.
“No, it’s… To be honest, it’s about Jax.”
Zooble blinks, clearly startled. Its arms drop to its sides, and instead it moves to sit on its bed. “Oh. Yeah. Hm.”
Tentatively, Pomni sits down next to them. “Yeah.”
“Did… Jax tell you something, before…?”
“Not— Not exactly. I told you guys that I saw in his mind, right? During the hug?” Zooble nods, eyebrows drawn. “Well, in order to talk to him, I had to go through his memories a bit. I didn’t see everything, but… And, well, I still want to keep his privacy a bit, but I saw him pretty much say that he was trans? In like a, he was in the closet way? So not a trans guy.” Pomni’s hands start to flounder as she tries to explain the scenario, falling into rambling territory. This is an inherently privacy-breaking conversation, but she still doesn’t want to dump all the stuff about Ribbit and Jax’s mom onto Zooble. Ughhh. “But, he never really says in what way, or if he even figured it out at all, and I don’t want to speculate, but using he/him feels wrong, but I never got to figure out what his, or their?, pronouns are, and Leeroy is so offline and androgynous that they’re no help at all—”
Zooble places a hand on Pomni’s shoulder. For some reason, she has the spatula equipped, and Pomni blinks at it. The more recognizable object look to it helps keep Pomni from brushing it off.
“Okay. Okay. I… Let me get this straight. Jax… Said he’s trans? Can you elaborate in what way he said…?”
“Um. So that’s the thing he— He didn’t say, exactly… But…” Jesus. She feels like she’s writing riddles on the fly. She hates this, and it shows in the deep sigh she heaves. “Okay. This part definitely can’t leave the room.” Zooble nods. “I was in his memories, like spectating them. He was talking to Ribbit, about his home life. He mentioned telling his mom something really personal, that would get her off his back about all her comments about his masculinity and his dad and stuff? I didn’t really get it, but then Ribbit put her bow on Jax’s ear, and he just…”
Her voice stutters off for a moment. Zooble tilts their head.
“He looked really happy.” She finishes lamely, her shoulders hunching inwards. “I’m underselling it, it’s hard to explain. But he looked really happy.” She doesn’t say he looked like he was in love. That’s not for Zooble to know. It’s not even for Pomni to know.
Zooble nods again. “I know what you mean.” He says quietly, in the space left behind. “And… Yeah. I see why you might be… In-between it all. I’m assuming he spooked himself into being a total closet-case afterwards?”
She huffs a bitter laugh, thinking of Ribbit and Kaufmo in the aquarium. “Severely.”
“Sounds like him.” Zooble lets out its own small laugh in return. “And you’re right about Leeroy. After the presentation I kind of had a feeling, but that would’ve been totally inappropriate timing.”
Pomni laughs a little more, a little freer, shutting her eyes and nodding. She thinks about that one inner-Jax, dressing gender-freaky at Zooble’s funeral. “Totally inappropriate. But, yeah. I wish I could just… Ask Leeroy. But I can’t. Plus, imagine you’re them, and you get a DM that’s like… Hey, so I’m a friend of a digital brain-copy of you that killed himself. It was really sad and we all miss him. What’s your pronouns?”
Zooble hunches over, cackling.
“Like— Like, what would you say?! R.I.P. queen, she/her?”
Zooble’s parts— their Zoobles?— start to clatter a bit as they laugh. “Oh my God— Stop—”
“I’m— I’d sound crazy! I’d probably make Leeroy think they were going crazy too!”
Zooble’s nodding through their laughter, flapping the hand that’s not next to Pomni. She grins as they wrangle themself back into a more sensible state.
“Jesus,” Zooble huffs, still sounding winded. “Okay, okay. Wow. Back to your actual problem.”
Pomni sobers, nodding again. Zooble looks thoughtful, but still holds the impression of a wry grin.
“Right. In my opinion, there’s… Not really a right answer.” Pomni frowns. That’s… Not helpful. Zooble’s posture turns sympathetic. “Maybe Jax wouldn’t have used he/him. Maybe he would’ve. They/them’s gender-neutral, but it’s not some ‘default state’ like people sometimes treat it to be, and it’s no more of a right answer than she/her or he/him. Without confirmation, and without any way to tell from Leeroy, it’s kind of just… Up in the air. I wouldn’t feel guilty for using he/him, if I were you. Especially with how he reacted to that maid dress when we were playing softball.”
She thinks back to that adventure, the lightning round. She thinks about how angry he’d been, face bright red and body language screaming embarrassment. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Zooble agrees, nodding. “Even if he knew he was transfem, if he was transfem, he clearly wasn’t comfortable with it.” Zooble leans back a bit on the bed, resting on their palms. “Which, in hindsight… Sucks. I kind of feel bad.”
She tilts her head at Zooble, letting her big pinwheel-eyes do the talking.
“I don’t feel any particular way about clothes. But I feel like… If I was way younger, and hadn’t accepted being androgynous, and someone snapped their fingers and I suddenly looked the way I do in the macroverse… It wouldn’t really be a happy moment for me, regardless of how I feel now. It’d just be weird.”
Pomni hums with a frown. “I… Well, I don’t get it, exactly. I always thought that… Like, don’t trans people just know? That’s what I always hear people say.”
Zooble’s spatula hand makes a so-so motion. “Eh. Sometimes. But not always. A lot of it depends on what flavor of dysphoria you have, if you have any at all. I never had dysphoria with clothing, so I didn’t really get what I was going through until later in my life. Sounds like Jax had something going on with clothes, but he also had vulnerability problems a mile long that were actively fighting against him, right up there with his mommy issues.”
Ouch. She bites her tongue in Jax’s defense.
“Plus, our identities aren’t really ‘set in stone,’ y’know? I know the whole rhetoric is that we were born this way and stuff, but that’s like… Half true?” Zooble scratches the side of their head. “I don’t remember exactly, I never really did research in the topic, but there’s not some hard-coded line of DNA in my brain that says I’m… Whatever. Unlabeled, any pronouns. My macroverse self is non-binary and just uses they/them, but I’m different. I grew to like change.”
Zooble sits up. Seemingly to prove his point, he pops off one of his legs. Using it, he kicks up a new one from the floor, grabs it out of the air, and slots it into place.
“My macroverse self decided change wasn’t for them. That doesn’t make either of us wrong. Even if Leeroy does come out as something in particular, that doesn’t necessarily mean Jax would’ve ended up feeling the same way. But it does still give us a good idea of their trajectory. You get what I mean, Pomni?”
It turns back to look at Pomni, whose eyes had gone fuzzy.
“Um. Pomni.” They nudge her with the old leg they were still holding. She blinks back into focus.
“I was listening! Just… Thinking.”
“Thinking about what?”
Pomni sighs. “I understood this all way less than I thought I did.”
Zooble lets out another laugh. It tosses the leg to the floor, using its other hand to pat Pomni on the back. “Trust me. Everyone feels that way.”
Pomni sighs, and drags herself to her feet. “Good to know. And… Thanks. This helped a lot. But… Um… Can you not go sharing this all around? I’m not saying keep it a secret, besides the really-personal memory-stuff, but just… I feel like Jax would’ve hated some cliche coming out thing, and I wanna handle this about the same.”
With a nod, Zooble stands. “I feel you. No major chatter from me. No promises on Gangle drawing fem Jax art though. More than usual, at least.”
“More than usual…?”
“Oh yeah. She loves gender-bends, it’s why Jax ended up in that maid dress in the first place. Wanna see her art of you as a dude?”
Kind of. “No. Not really. I’m… Gonna go now.”
Zooble’s grin felt a little too insightful now. “Alright. See ya.”
With a wave, Pomni left.
She thought about the dress in her room, the women’s fashion staple that Jax probably never even thought to try, because he never got that far and wouldn’t have had someone to tell him to get one. She thinks about Leeroy Mateo, shoulder length hair and emo-boy selfies, tucked against friends in a queer bar.
(She thinks about prom. She went with a boy she barely knew from her math class, who dressed in a standard tux, who cringed away from her when she arrived in a formal jumpsuit, the closest thing to a tux that she could convince her mom to let her wear. She didn’t feel like dancing anyways, and was content to sit in the corner and eat snacks and play solitaire, watching the throng of teenagers move, far too compact for her liking.)
(Pomni can’t help but hate how complicated it all has to be.)