Archive of Our Own

One vaguely week-shaped thing past the day the only world they’ll ever know fell completely to pieces, Jax is stood in front of Pomni, and he’s about to walk away. 

(His head hurts.)

They’ve been trying to fix the circus—everyone else, that is, Jax likes to think he’s been winning in the competitive isolation department—and they seem like they’ve been making a crawling sort of progress. He’s pretty sure the chasm on his left and Pomni’s right is a little bit smaller than it was before, at least. It was just Pomni and Kinger working on it at the start, but the others wandered out of the woodwork sometime after they’d rounded off their respective fits of self-pity. 

By process of elimination, it should be his turn to get over whatever stupid thing’s come over him and pick up where he left off, but… well, it’s different now. The genre’s shifted or whatever, gone from the surrealist comedy he’s been trying to make himself a home in to something more sobering. Maybe dystopian, or post-apocalyptic. They’re not trying to bring themselves back to ground zero, they’re just trying to recover. 

In a world like that, Jax isn’t sure what’s left for him is much better than the cellar. 

(His head hurts.)

He’d gone up to Pomni anyway, some halfhearted attempt to insert himself back into the narrative, but Pomni is looking at him now, and all Jax can see is the same furrowed brow from however-long-it-was ago; the phantom whisper of ‘do you trust me?’ in his ears, and every awful thing that happened after. 

Every time he’s tried to open up in the circus, he’s ruined something. Someone. He’ll scratch a wound until it bleeds if it means he doesn’t have to look at the scab; he’s apparently so insistent on not having any witnesses to his bullshit that he’s not satisfied with their vow of silence until they’ve taken it to the closest grave they have in here.

He’s been trying not to think about it, but there’s really nothing else to do anymore—and the only time he’d been in his room since Caine got deleted he’d seen a flash of something in the mirror. Only for a moment, too much of a memory to be real, but he couldn’t burn the image out of his brain if he tried. However-long-it-was ago, in someone else’s room, wearing whatever counted as someone else’s clothes—briefly, briefly entertaining the idea of living a life that would never, ever be meant for him. 

(Sometimes he swears he can still see the memory following him down the corridors. He thinks there’d be something kind of cyclical about him taking it to the grave, too.)

(His head hurts.)

So he’s about to walk away. Of course he is—what else would he do? He’s a gag character; he’s only meant to stick around for as long as he’s funny, and the joke has long since burned dry. He has nothing to say to Pomni that’s worth being heard.

She’s looking at him weird, obviously, because he’s approached her out of the blue and stared at her for a good ten seconds and not said a word even though he’s supposed to be good at that. At saying whatever he thinks will make everyone stop taking things so seriously, whatever will make it easier to believe that cartoon logic is the only reality they operate under. But—

(But they’re real.)

(But the people they were before are still alive out there, and none of them have any idea who they are, and none of them have any idea what’s happened to them since.)

(But his head hurts.)

He imagines trying to tell Pomni something, the way he’d said something once-twice once upon a time. Even in his own imagination, he falters on the first syllable, because he can’t even think whatever’s meant to be coming out of his mouth. He imagines that Pomni would look at him, in that long, searching way she’s done before in the gaps of their arguments, and it’s too much to bear. 

Jax grits his teeth, pushes a sigh past them like steam hissing from a vent, and goes to walk away. The way he keeps saying he will. 

…

…The way he apparently can’t. 

His head hurts, it isn’t turning away like he wants it to, and his feet aren’t twisting to move in the opposite direction. He’s been leaving all his life—why isn’t it working now? Of all the times fight-or-flight has kicked in, he’s never frozen before. Of all times, of all the times it’s mattered, it’s the last time it’ll ever matter that he’s frozen in place? 

Oh. Yeah.

Because if he does, it’s going to be the last time that he ever does. 

The thing that’s been aching and building in the back of his head since the start crescendoes with a convulsing violence, and like a vision of thread unfurling in front of him, he begins to see something in the shadows beyond them. He outright refuses to believe what he’s seeing, at first, but as it comes into sharper clarity, there’s no denying it like there was in his room, with the memory. 

It’s a mirror—him and Pomni stood in parallel, and him walking away. 

He still can’t move, his eyelids won’t even twitch in time with his command, so he’s forced to watch this phantom of himself fade in departure, and the grainy copy of Pomni stare for a little longer before she turns, too. She leaves and fades the same way he does, walking away to a place this living-dream can’t follow. 

There’s a pause, and he thinks that’s supposed to be it—and how pointless would that be, just to show him how he’ll look as he runs away again—but it isn’t. Suddenly, the real Pomni isn’t even in front of him anymore, fully consumed by whatever this strange vision is supposed to be. 

And then—

The potential of himself is there again, and takes just a few moments to find himself a quiet place to die. 

It’s nothing like what he’d seen before, behind his own eyes, in the half-dream that had lit up his room with an unnerving neon glow in the couple of seconds after he’d jolted awake. He’s never actually seen anyone abstract before. Patches of his skin grow shadowy and bloated, striking outwards like there’s something inside him scratching to get out as his breathing turns panicked. The new eyes split open like sudden wounds, and the spirals of colour spilling within them could almost be mistaken for bleeding at first. 

He watches himself choke on a wet cry just as his face begins to disappear entirely. The whole thing takes about thirty seconds, and it’s one of the longest of his life. It’s just—it had felt like little more than a soft dream when he’d entertained the notion of it last time. This... this looks like it hurts. 

The dying version of Jax curls into himself, and disappears beneath the swallowing static. 

The world changes around them, and he sees the aftermath; stood on the ground as his abstraction flings itself about and the others watch numbly from the balcony. Gangle slumps against a wall as Zooble joins her. She can’t cry for him, apparently, and maybe that should hurt, but at least it makes sense. Zooble punching the wall with a strength that amounts to nothing at all, teary and furious, certainly doesn’t. 

Kinger is nowhere to be found. Ragatha and Pomni watch him as Gangle and Zooble leave, and then they talk. 

Jax doesn’t really listen—they’re whispering something to each other, and then they’re hugging, and crying, and he doesn’t know if it’s for him or for themselves or what, but eventually, they stop and walk away, staring at each other as they go until they’re completely out of each other’s sight. After that, he can only see Pomni. 

She leads his abstraction into the hallway they’d had a shootout with Kinger in during the gun adventure, and with a conjured copy of the same revolver, Pomni shoots out all the lights until the only thing he can see is the glow of a hundred abstracted eyes, and their reflection in hers. Miraculously, his abstraction doesn’t move to attack her; it just leans forward, closes its eyes as she reaches out. 

And somehow—like organs parting in the decisive incision of her grip—she sees the inside of him. 

He has to watch all of it. Cartoonish playbys of all the things he’d pretended would happen if any of them abstracted, jokes he’d told himself in private to preempt the reality of the punchline. He watches Pomni watch them, the doors slamming shut in front of her seconds after she’s seen too much, and his skin crawls. It’s so different outside of his mind’s eye; having it in front of him, taken in by a witness, knowing it’s too late here to take any of it back makes it feel real in a way it never really has before. 

If he had the ability to do anything, he might have felt like throwing up, but as it is, the world moves on without him. Pomni goes behind a locked door, and she sees, in full, the flash of the something he’d ignored in the mirror. The beginning, a slow-build he’d almost forgotten in favour of everything that happened afterwards. And then the however-long-ago, in someone else’s room, and the day he decides to ruin everything for little more than his inability to have anything. 

And then the scene becomes something that had never happened before. Pomni stood in the dark with him, under the rose glow of a lamp that doesn’t exist. 

He sees himself fall apart, too late to do anything else. Pomni, despite everything, tips forward and hugs him like the world is going to end if she lets go—like she wants to become part of him even if it might be killing her outside of whatever not-world they’re in. Almost in slow motion, and with far too much clarity for the distance between them, Jax sees something cross his future's face. A realisation of something; a look at the view halfway down the precipice he’s already flung himself from. It cracks in his chest like a whip just to look at it, at the way his shoulders hike, breaths shortening. 

(She hears herself say, lit by lamplight and teardrops glowing against the floor, that she doesn’t want to go. And then she sees herself go.)

Jax snaps back into the real world like a heart restarting, and behind the flash of reality returning he sees the afterimages of the things that haven’t happened yet. Behind the real Pomni’s slowly shuttering face, every single eye on the apparition of himself stares straight at him, as a woman he’d never planned to care about clutches him like the world is ending, and they both shatter into a supernova.

Jax had been about to walk away. He’s just—

Is that really what’s going to happen if he walks away?

“I—” Jax chokes, suddenly forced to hold back the pressure of a tsunami behind his eyelids, because he doesn’t understand what he’s just seen, and Pomni has no idea, and everything has quickly become a kind of terrifying that he’s never had to face head-on before. And the words still won’t come out of him. 

“Fuck,” he says, and—oh, it wasn’t just a fluke when Zooble said it. The filter really is gone. “Fuck.”

Pomni stares at him like she’s never seen him before. “Jax? What’s wrong?”

He’s still reeling; the ground feels like it’s going to fall out from under him, and if he stumbles any further towards the glowing gap in the floor he might actually tumble head-first into the void. He doesn’t know how real anything he just saw is meant to be—he doesn’t know how it could be—but it’s frightening. It rings in his ears, what that apparition of him had said, and it was right. He doesn’t want to go. If he walks away, he’ll abstract, and everyone will see it, and Pomni will pry into the meat of him and it will change absolutely nothing. He doesn’t want things to end that way. 

It was too late, in that vision. But—fucking hell—it can't be too late now. He can’t let it be. 

Unfortunately, whatever it is that he just saw still hasn’t given him the right words, even though he has to say something, because he’s seen what happens when he doesn’t. Pomni had looked like she was getting sick of waiting before, but since he’d choked out that last curse she just looks concerned. He needs to say something. He needs to do something. 

“I don’t know what to say,” he groans, sick with dread.

Pomni takes in the state of him, the livewire tremor he’s suddenly taken on, the pupils he can physically feel shrinking in paralysed unknowing, the desperate twist of his frown, and a decision falls firm across her face.

“Come on,” she says, holding up a hand like an olive branch, staring him straight in the eyes. “Let’s go help the others fill the gaps.”

And it’s not a complete diversion from that future he’s seen. They’ve still not actually talked; he’s not given himself the chance to ruin anything yet. There’s a million ways this could still go wrong, even if it won’t be exactly the same as what he saw.

But—Goddamnit, at least it’s not a goodbye. 

Going up to everyone with Pomni after watching his entire world collapse is the single most awkward thing he’s ever done. 

She’s holding his hand as they walk towards them—to make sure that he doesn’t run away like he’d clearly been so desperate to earlier, or something. That vision from before is one hell of a motivator not to, but, well… there’s a voice in the back of his head that’s saying it’s probably for the best. He’s already getting kind of twitchy. 

(He swears there’s something behind him, but he doesn’t want to turn around and find out what it is.)

The others are stood around one of the bigger chasms, still working on covering the void peering out from below. The circus has always been eerily quiet between the chaos of adventures, but in the wake of the breakdown their footsteps echo like church bells, so by the time he and Pomni have appeared in their peripheral, they’re already looking at them. 

“Hey guys,” Pomni says, like nothing’s happened—if he really thinks about it, nothing actually has. Not for her. “Room for two more?”

The pause between the question and the response is barely present, but the split-second of silence still manages to speak volumes. Ragatha’s eyes flit between him and Pomni, as if trying to ascertain what’s happened quickly enough that she won’t have to ask. Zooble looks like they’re trying to muster the energy to be suspicious, but falling short they just settle for tired. Gangle’s half of a deer in headlines, frozen stiff with surprise at how drawn in he must look, smaller than he’s ever made himself seem and swallowing back the urge to glare at her so she’ll stop reminding him of it. Kinger’s the only one not paying them any more mind than he would usually, save for one vaguely thoughtful glance. 

Jax hasn’t had the chance to get used to the idea of Kinger being thoughtful in that sense of the word yet. Then again, he’s not used to anyone else looking this particular kind of exhausted, either. 

Despite any visible or otherwise apparent reservations, the others agree with various murmurs of assent, and some shuffling to make space around the gap they’re working on. Jax and Pomni slip in, for some reason still holding hands as Pomni gets ready to start the whole conjuring routine again. 

She’s apparently been practising enough in the last while that she can focus on making the filler with only one hand, so after a little bit of centring and looking down into the void, Pomni lifts a palm and begins. Jax hasn’t specifically tried to do anything with conjuring since they found out about it, but he’s been operating on cartoon logic for a while now, so after a few awkward misfires, he just about gets the hang of it. No one says anything, but Ragatha gives him a shaky nod when their eyes accidentally meet, and they keep going. 

It’s weird—the formation they’ve taken, the misshapen circle they’re in around the slowly dwindling chasm. Even as the hole itself begins to disappear, there’s more space left on Jax’s side than there is Pomni’s.

He knows why it’s there, but it’s the first time he’s ever really thought about it. 

Once everyone has silently decided they’re done for whatever counts as the ‘day’, for only the second time since Caine got deleted, Jax goes back to his room. It’s done almost without thinking. By the time he realises where he’s gone, he’s already sat on the bed, back to the wall, and by then it’s too late to leave. 

Jax tries not to make a habit of looking back on the decisions he’s made, but there’s little else left to do. That, and the spectre of what he’d seen during his not-quite-conversation with Pomni demands his attention. He’d been reacting like an animal caught in a bear trap—metal teeth in the twitching eyes of the vision of himself abstracted—and the decision to stay, even for just a day longer, was so abrupt he’s still reeling from it.

He’s not sure how much his split-second panic will actually change things. Seriously, how long does he think he’s going to last in this new story, one so obviously not built for him? The dynamic’s shifted; there’s no need for absurdist comic relief in this sober, black-and-white feature; they’ve outgrown the need for role. That hole in the floor would have been fixed whether he’d been there or not.

For a moment, he curses the sudden bout of survival instinct that had come over him—whatever digital hallucination had driven him back from the inevitable conclusion of his character. Who knows? Maybe he’s diverted enough from that future that Pomni won’t pry into him if he goes now. After all, when he’s not being funny, he’s just boring. Maybe the last few hours were enough for her to figure out that there’s nothing worth reading between the lines of him for. 

He’s just on the cusp of the thought—the there’s nothing left worth staying for—when the room turns chiaroscuro. 

There’s something in the mirror again, and it’s not just in his peripheral this time. The however-long-it-was ago, a moment in time paused just to ache at him. He doesn’t understand how he can see it from third person, and he hates that he can see the look on the face of the memory—when did he ever look that happy?

Well, he didn’t, he supposes. That version of what-could-have-been lived and died from one second to the next. He’s just what got left behind. 

It’s really only here to rub salt in the wound, he thinks, but it’s made worse by the cold shadow he can feel at his back, against the wall with everything he’d ruined turned away from him. He doesn’t turn around to face it, he knows what apparition of himself is waiting to watch him there. In the end, he’s not made a decision at all, has he? Nothing’s changed, he’s as stuck in limbo now as he was frozen in front of Pomni, staring down at the bear trap caught around his legs. 

The memory in the mirror is as it always will be. He looks at it, falters when it looks back, and closes his eyes—looking neither forward nor back any longer. It looks like he’s still got to figure out what chewing his leg off means after all. 

With nothing else left for him to do, Jax keeps going back to help fix the holes in the circus with the others. 

It would make more sense for them to split up and fix several at the same time, but for some reason, nobody ever mentions it. They just cram themselves around a single chasm and work at it in what’s probably the most inefficient way possible, all of them making tiny little constructs to fit together like a bad jigsaw puzzle. 

It’s slow-going, but they are making pretty significant progress. At this point, they’ve nearly finished filling in the gaps entirely. That should be a good thing, since falling into the void would just be the icing on the cake of this complete disaster, but—well…

Jax lingers, one day, after they’ve finished filling up one of the final holes; only a couple left until the circus is whole again, whatever that means now. The others keep leaving to wherever it is they go, but Pomni lingers with him. She doesn’t say anything at first, she just stares at where the break in the floor used to be, matching his gaze and his silence.

She makes no real indication of it, but somehow he still knows what it means. I’m not leaving until you tell me to. 

God, he should just tell her to. 

There’s no reason beyond the cold at his back for why he doesn’t.

“We’re running out holes to cover.” he says, for lack of anything else to voice. They haven’t actually talked since the conversation-that-wasn’t; they’ve been existing in silent proximity since then, and she’s the only one who’ll stand next to him without leaving a gap.

She nods idly, but she doesn’t look at him yet. “Yeah, we should be done by—uh, by tomorrow, I guess.”

“Right,” the word comes out kind of flat—like it’s not sure how it’s supposed to feel. Pomni tilts her head, eyes shifting.

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever. It’s just—” he scoffs over the sound his own stumbling, already tired of the conversation he’s apparently about to start. “What are we even gonna do after that?”

Pomni turns her head a little to give him a sidelong look, and Jax watches the shape of her in his peripheral. She considers the question with a hum. “Well, I don’t know know what everyone else is thinking, but I’d like to try getting some colour back. I’m kinda starting to miss the constant eyestrain.” 

It’s a very careful joke, but it still makes Jax bristle with frustration, because she’s not getting the point. “And after that? There’s only so much you can fix before you hit a dead end—you’re never gonna get things back to the way they were before. That’s gone. Caput. It went kablooey the second Caine did.” he works himself up to a proper sneer, hand gesturing contained wildly in front of him, still facing the not-hole in the floor instead of her. Pomni’s expression doesn’t change.

“That’s fine. I don’t want what we had before,” she replies, casual as she likes even as Jax finally turns to look at her, head whipping around with an expression twisting in incredulity. “I want things to be better.”

Jax sighs, trying for annoyed and falling somewhere short of it. “I just don’t see the point,” he mutters, turning away again.

But Pomni’s shoulders square, hearing something in the response she wasn’t supposed to be listening for, gaze turning more solid. She’s still assessing him as she asks, “Do you remember the café?”

Jax barely responds around the effort to disguise his wince behind a scoff. God, does he remember that café—albeit maybe not for whatever reason Pomni’s thinking. Pomni seems to take the reaction as a confirmation anyway. 

“I told you to be here later,” she clarifies, voice hard. Not strict, just... unwavering. “It’s not later yet. That’s when you can decide if any of this is worth staying for.”

“And when will that be, huh?” Jax pries, though he doesn’t think he’s so shocked by the audacity anymore. He’s doesn’t think he’s ever met someone quite this stubborn before. Or maybe he has, and it's just that he's usually better than this at getting stubborn people to give up.

Pomni smiles regardless; secretive, with a hint of mischief and far too much knowing. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

When we get there, she says. Like she won’t let the time pass without him. 

(Like somewhere in the future-that-isn’t, she’s holding the death of him like the world will end if she lets go.)

“Fine,” he says, somewhere between a resignation and a challenge. “Deal.”

Jax is back in his room again. 

He’s watching the mirror, feeling the cold at his back. 

The memory plays again, like it always does when he stares at it for too long, thinks about it too much. He takes in the outsider’s view of the situation and tries not to feel anything about it. The face of someone long gone, softer than he can bring himself to remember it. That version of him, that could’ve been something else. 

In the mirror, the air is never broken by the funeral bell of an awkward knock on the door. It lasts forever, stills where it should stop. It’s almost as if it’s aware it’s being watched. 

Jax lies down—closing his eyes as he turns around, so as to avoid the alternative—and thinks that he needs stop coming back to his room. 

He knows he probably will anyway.

All the holes in the circus have been patched up, and although they’re still trying to figure out how to bring some of the colour back to their surroundings, they’re also working to restore some of the things that got lost to the void. Zooble and Gangle have split off on their own today—because apparently some of the things in Zooble’s room got destroyed alongside the circus breaking—so there’s only four of them right now. Today, they’re back where their sad excuse for a ‘living room’ used to be, trying to conjure back their old sofas.

“Is it weird to say that they’re the things I’ve been missing the most?” Ragatha says, as they work out how big the carpet used to be. “I mean, they were kind of the only place to sit other than the dining table, but…” 

Jax smells the opportunity to retort like blood in the water—it is weird, or maybe we could take the stuffing out of you and make pillows, or whatever—but he’s not had much energy to spare for back and forth that doesn’t go anywhere these days. 

“They’ve been here since the beginning,” Kinger finishes simply. He’s been oddly sage ever since Pomni stuck that bucket on his head after Caine lost it, and it’s still weirding him out. “It was somewhere we could all be together, just to talk. I miss it too.”

Ragatha shoots the old man a grateful, wavering smile, and Jax turns away to focus on kicking his feet against the newly-conjured rug—to test the physics of the fabric, obviously. 

The carpet didn’t take much time at all to figure out, but unfortunately the sofas turn out to be more complicated. There’s more bits and pieces to keep in mind, and making something that actually balances right is another beast entirely. It takes what feels like hours just to make two that look mostly like their old ones, save for the lack of colour that everything seems to have, and by that point they’re collectively wiped from both the effort of the conjuring and the arguments they’ve had about it. 

“Maybe we should take a break for a minute,” Pomni suggests, and then when Ragatha hesitates, adds: “We might as test their durability. We wouldn’t want to make any more if these two are gonna break when we sit on them.”

Ragatha almost seems relieved to have the excuse. “That’s a good point,” she sighs, before carefully situating herself on one of the sofas. Kinger sits next to her after Ragatha nods at his quiet request, and Pomni sits on the other sofa. It would be weirder if Jax didn’t sit down, so he has no choice but to join her after a moment of deliberation. 

They settle themselves down, Ragatha leaning around one way or another to keep up the pretence of having a practical reason for the rest break until she’s satisfied that the thing isn’t going to fall out from underneath her. Jax leans his whole weight back on the sofa to stare straight up at the ceiling, and he doesn’t clip through the cushioning behind him, so he stays that way. 

They chat idly for a bit—or the other three do, at least. Probably about their next plans for renovations, but Jax isn’t really listening for the most part. He’d have been content to stay that way until they got up to finish the job, except, for some reason, the other three attempt to bring him into the conversation. 

“…Jax?” Ragatha fits into a pause, with a weighted hesitance. “Are you okay?”

She looks nervous to even be asking, like Jax is going to bite her head off for the crime of it. It’s not an unwarranted fear—he’s repeatedly proven to her that trying to instigate any kind of emotional conversation with him leads to nothing but pain. He’s done it on purpose. Her expression is only the result of his deliberate, concentrated efforts. 

It’s stupid that it makes him feel sick to look at now. 

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” he grins sardonically back, because it’s still easier than admitting to that. Pomni makes a face beside him; not annoyed, per se, but a sort of vague disappointment that makes his grip tighten against the strange material of the sofa. To his surprise, though, it’s Ragatha who shoots him a real stare. 

She’s been annoyed at him before, sure, but she’s never looked quite this flavour of grimly unimpressed. “Why would you be?” she retorts, and—damn, it looks like he missed the scene where she grew a spine that wasn’t dedicated to bending over for everyone else’s sake. 

…Or, well, maybe it’s less that she's grown a spine, and more that she's gotten tired of pretending she doesn't have one.

(She’d made him laugh with her retorts, once or twice, back when his jabs hadn’t been so carefully sharpened. Before he’d ruined it.)

(He really had taken more from everyone than just Ribbit and Kaufmo, hadn’t he?)

He doesn’t say anything to her reply, however, and eventually—after meeting his eyes for a long moment—she sighs, blinking heavy and breathing deep. “You’ve just been quiet lately, is all,” she says. “And I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

Jax can physically feel the way his pupils shrink, tensing in his recline. Right. Yeah. Because she’d know better than most what happens when someone gets quiet here. But that just begs the question: “Why not? I’ve wanted bad things to happen to the rest of you all the time.” Jax doesn’t get any satisfaction from the way she flinches back at the reminder anymore, apparently. 

But Ragatha draws herself back up again. “Well, yeah—you wanted bad things to happen to everyone, including yourself. So I don’t want bad things to happen to anyone, including you.”

“You just want things to go back to the way they were.” he says, the way he can’t stop saying it, in that biting tone that makes a voice in the back of his head wonder who he’s really saying it for.

Ragatha just stares at him from the other side. “No,” she says, firm, but with an earnestness and a vague heartbreak that she’s never quite been able to shake off. “I want to be happy this time.” 

He blinks hard, trying to will away the something that burbles at the surface of him, uncertain and uncomfortable. She’s always been persistent, but this is… this is a different kind than before; more self-assured than he’s seen her. The way she phrases it, it’s almost like the compassion is out of spite for him, and it’s kind of funny to think of it like that, but he knows it isn’t. She might not like him, but despite everything he’s done, the way she is has very little to do with him. 

Isn’t that funny? Ragatha had a shitty mother, and she decided that she needed to spend her whole life being kind to compensate for it. Jax had a shitty mother, and he decided that he needed to make it everyone else’s problem. 

Jax still thinks she could stand to do something with the anger she must have cooking up there more often, but Ragatha probably thinks he could stand to do less with his, so… what the hell. Maybe they’ve both got a point. 

They get up two minutes later, and they finish conjuring the sofas.

People keep saying they want things to be better than before, to be happier than they were. Pomni and Ragatha’s voices blur into a carousel in his head as he looks into the mirror, glaring at the reflection that isn’t his.

The memory of what-could-have-been sits next to Ribbit on the bed, face tinted pink and tied off with a bow that doesn’t even belong to anyone anymore. Ribbit’s face is obscured behind the memory’s silhouette, but he remembers the shape of it well enough for it to make him nauseous. The moment is frozen right before its ending, the way it always is when Jax watches it for too long. 

But something changes, this time. He looks in the face of what-never-really-was, and it turns its head, and looks right back at him. 

He rears back like he’s been struck, eyes darting away before drawing back, horrified and fascinated. “What—what is this,” he asks, too murmured for the question to reach his tone. He doesn’t know how he manages to sound hoarse in a world where they don’t need water. “What are you doing.”

The memory doesn’t say anything. It just stares at him. 

“What do you want?” he snaps anyway, flinching forward and drawing his shoulders up like a threat display. He hasn’t looked at himself in the mirror in a long time, and this is the first time the what-could-have-been has ever looked directly at him. It’s a warped imitation of his face, wide-eyed and soft and brimming with potential—or he’s a warped imitation of it. He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about it. 

The memory still doesn’t speak, but as if in answer Pomni and Ragatha’s words from before echo back in his head. I don’t want what we had before, I want things to be better. I want to be happy this time. Its gaze tells him nothing, but Jax still reads some kind of plea off the surface of it. 

Jax seethes in the irony of it. It must not know its future, but he can’t forget it no matter how hard he tries—they’d done a literal flashback to the way he’d ruined everything in the wake of it, and it stings like a reopened wound that had barely had the chance to clot beforehand. The memory is freeze-frame proof in and of itself; it wants something that he can’t have, can’t be.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, pal, but it’s a little late for that. I’m not you.” he spits. If there was ever a version of him that could’ve been something else, it’s been left behind wherever Ribbit is now. 

And the venom in his tone doesn’t reach it, doesn’t move it, but the shadows at his back darken so suddenly that he’s startled into turning around.

The abstraction of himself looms over him like a cliff over a canyon, but unlike the real thing it doesn’t charge forward to attack him. In tandem with the memory in front of them both, it just stares, eyeglow pulsing against the walls like a slowing heartbeat. In the dark of its form, he can just about make out the image of something. Pink lamplight and two figures, only the face of one visible from the angle of the embrace, with an expression blooming into a brilliant and tragic sort of understanding. 

(“I don’t want to go”, she’d said. And then she’d gone.)

The two endings of himself stare at him from opposite sides of the room, leering the same conclusion into him, but they’re both impossible and he doesn’t know which is worse. The reflection is a single death playing on an eternal loop, but the shadow clinging to his back is two deaths at once. The first in the supernova of abstraction, and the second when he’d decided that he was going to keep clinging to the ledge he’d been staring down the foot of all this time—that that future wouldn’t happen to him. 

He looks back at the mirror, and in his head its blank, knowing-unknowing face becomes the worst sort of taunt. He’d had better, for a moment, and he’d lost it. 

Jax puts his head in his hands, and leaves the room. 

Jax keeps leaving the room, and thankfully the habit of walking away from his problems begins to stick again. He still sees the others, chipping in with the conjuring and the brainstorming sessions for bringing back some colour, but he doesn’t really talk much, and not with the energy he used to muster. The others mainly leave him to it. 

Pomni can never seem to resist being closer when he goes quiet, like she’s worried about what’s going on in his head despite Jax having taken the route to avoid her seeing inside it. She doesn’t try to hold his hand again, like she did on that one day, but she does lean her weight on him, sometimes, and admittedly it does make him feel a little bit more solid. 

But Pomni isn’t here right now; it’s the middle of what they’ve collectively agreed as ‘night’. Everyone left the day behind on a high note, having just managed to get the sofas and the rug looking brighter than they were before alongside the addition of the old table. They’re hoping that they can use the same method for brightening up items they didn’t conjure, but that remains to be seen. Jax is wandering around the empty halls in their meantime—going nowhere in particular for the sake of being anywhere else. He doesn’t mean to, but he still ends up rounding back to the sofas and the rug. 

Someone is already there, though—he’s so distracted he only notices when he’s close enough to actually look them in the eyes—the two of them. 

Gangle is sat with her ribbon knees to her ribbon chest, and Zooble is right there next to her. 

They’re both looking at him. 

He wants to ignore them, keep on with his aimless pacing until everyone else wakes up and there’s something better for him to do, but they’re really looking at him—these strange, assessing gazes they’ve always been too busy avoiding him to cast before. He thinks it’s the first time either of the two have properly looked him in the eyes since he came back from the brink-that-wasn’t holding Pomni’s hand. It’s unnerving, in the same sort of way the ocean below the pier is when you’ve already decided you’re going to jump in.

Slowly, like grinding steel over stone, he makes his way over, and sits on the sofa furthest away from them. When it becomes clear they’re just going to keep looking at him until he speaks, he sighs and forces himself to open his mouth. 

“Hi,” he says, less greeting, more a flat note of a question. “What do you want?”

Zooble looks at him even more weirdly at that. “Why would you think we want something from you?”

“Because you kept looking at me.” Jax bites back, equally as bewildered and only barely pushing it behind the bitter frustration. 

Zooble raises an eyebrow. “Not much else for us to look at around here,” they answer wryly. And then, “You’ve been acting weird lately.” Jax just rolls his eyes. 

“You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

“So you admit it?”

He scoffs, leaning back against the sofa like it’ll put any more distance between them. “You can think whatever you want. I don’t care.”

Zooble narrows their eyes at him, but they don’t respond, and Jax almost thinks that’s going to be it; that they’ll sit here in tense silence until one of the three of them has had enough and decides to leave. Instead, to his shock, Gangle interjects. 

“You have been acting differently, though,” she argues, and even in the gaping holes of her pupil-less eyes he can somehow tell she’s looking into his. “You’re not doing any of the things you usually do.”

Jax breaks the eye-contact first. “It’s not like there’s any point in trying to make you miserable when everything’s miserable. That’s just boring,” he mutters balefully. He hears the sharp intake of breath that implies the beginning of a response from Zooble, but, second in the string of surprises from her, Gangle puts a hand on Zooble’s arm to stop them.

There’s a long pause, as Gangle searches the silhouette of him, but eventually she musters whatever courage she needs to find. As if to encourage her, Zooble wraps an arm around her shoulders, and they share a soft look that Jax pretends not to notice, waiting on whatever it is she feels so compelled to say to him. 

“I just—I’ve been wondering about it a lot recently, but… do you ever feel sorry for some of the things you’ve done?” she asks. Quietly, like it’ll hit less like a lead-weight if she does. “Have you ever been?”

His first instinct is to retort immediately, with something completely thoughtless—of course not, why would I be, I never did anything that wasn’t funny to watch—but, well, they’re right. He has been different lately, and he doesn’t have the energy to keep up the pretence anymore. He might as well do one decent thing in amongst it, and give her the meagre dignity of thinking about his response for more than a second. 

The answer, ten silent seconds later, comes from clenched between his teeth like it’s actively pulling one out as he speaks. “I know I’m a terrible person, okay?” both of them look at him, faces either shocked or entirely unreadable, and the twin stares manage to pry the rest of it out of him. “I’ve been a terrible person. I did some real awful shit before either of you showed up, and I did even more awful shit after that. I’m surprised you didn’t abstract. I don’t think one sorry is really gonna cut it.”

“No,” replies Gangle, near immediately. “It won’t. But I guess it would be… a relief, to hear that you might not want to be that way anymore. A sorry would at least be a start.”

Zooble’s arm tightens around her shoulder, the picture of soft pride. Jax can’t bring himself to look as he says it, but in the end, he hisses out a sigh and bites the bullet. “I guess that’s a good point. Yeah, I’m sorry.”

Gangle doesn’t smile, but something in her expression has changed by the time he opens his eyes again. “I don’t forgive you, and I probably never will,” she says, simple and certain. “But thanks.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

The pause in the aftermath lasts for long enough that Jax considers leaning back and falling asleep on the sofa, if only to avoid having to go back to his room, but then he realises that would leave Zooble and Gangle to just watch him while he slept, and he quickly decides to make himself scarce instead. He gets all the way off the sofa and up towards the hallway before Zooble pipes up one last time from behind him. 

“Hey,” they call, and he turns around, dead-faced. “Just remember: if we’ve got to figure out how to live with all the crap you’ve pulled, then you’ve got to live with it too. It’s only fair.”

It is, in essence, the same thing they’d said to him when he’d tried to leave after the fake-escape adventure. We’re not gonna have you wandering off alone somewhere and abstracting—you’re pain in the ass, but you’re still one of us. It’d been an ice-shock to his system at the time, but these days, he’s started to resign himself to the fact that they’re going to care about him no matter how little he deserves it. Whether he likes it or not; maybe especially because he doesn't like it. 

He nods just barely enough to indicate that he’d heard them, and keeps walking. He thinks about the way the spectre of Gangle hadn’t cried at his abstraction—and the way Zooble had—for the rest of the night. 

Time passes. The world keeps turning. It takes a while, but eventually, the colour starts coming back to the circus in earnest. 

Miraculously, eventually, so does Caine. 

It’s an unremarkable sort of day when it happens—they’re all hanging around listlessly on the sofas, discussing something that goes completely forgotten in the aftermath—Jax isn’t speaking much, but he still chimes in on occasion. Pomni is sat next to him, and he’s found himself slowly leaning towards her as the time ticks on, like a plant on a windowsill bending towards the sun. When Caine floats up to them out of nowhere, her first instinct is apparently to grab for his hand, the same way Zooble’s first instinct is to leap up and put a protective arm out in front of Gangle. 

“I understand that you’re afraid,” he says. “I don’t expect forgiveness.” He sounds like a popped balloon, posture deflated and all the helium that had kept him floating above them drained away. Jax only stands up because Pomni does too, and she hasn’t let go of his hand yet, but really… he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to feel about this. He doesn’t think Caine really needs his forgiveness in particular. 

Caine at least hadn’t known what he was doing to the others when he hurt them, most of the time—Jax had had the liberty of knowing exactly what he was doing. Still, it looks like they both have to live with the worst of their mistakes. 

But then Caine says he’s made something for them, and he waits for them by the stage in front of a small, deliberately put-together projector, feet planted on the floor for the first time in what must be forever. One giant sofa has been conjured for them all to share. He debates hovering at the back of it—because Kinger and Zooble have already taken the ends and he’s not sure he should sit next to anyone—but Pomni offers a space next to her, and Ragatha gives him an awkward, accepting nod, and he doesn’t refuse it. 

Caine doesn’t give them any forewarning once they’re seated—all he says is “No more secrets, no more mind games”, before the projector is turning on as the circus goes dark around them. 

And then… it’s them. 

It’s all of them. The people they used to be, that have continued being long after they put the headset on and sent new versions of their minds careening through pixelated space unaware of the difference. It’s weird, seeing the pasts of the others that he’d always considered stagnant having unfolded into the future in their absence. Abigail reached out to people, Zoey started posting her comic after all, Riley got to open their bar. Grant is still with his wife, and he even has two kids now. 

Suzie cut her mother off completely, and she’s built a life for herself that the woman will never touch. In a sense, Ragatha has too. 

But the last person to appear on the tiny projector screen is Leeroy Mateo. The person he used to be, and the person he never was, who’s been living on without him all this time. 

Jax never imagined that the person he was could have a future in the real world, but there they are. They’ve grown their hair out, found their way off of the streets by taking an outstretched hand offered to them—they’re covering up their face in every photo they’re in, just badly enough for the camera to catch the smile anyway. They are, apparently, a familiar face in Riley’s bar. 

It feels a little bit like looking into that reflection in the mirror, the one that he’s been seeing in his room for the last few months; a moment in the eternity of time, a microcosmic glimpse of a person who’s on the precipice of coming into their own. Nothing is made truly clear, through Caine’s webweave of information gleaned from social media and online articles, but somehow, he knows that Leeroy isn’t going to run away from it the way he did, back in the however-long-ago.  

It won’t be too late for Lee.

Jax’s mind is brought back like a flinch to the past month, the things he’s kept trying not to look in the face of, the vision that started it all. An apparition of himself, begging in the arms of someone who cares about him, I don’t want to go. It’d kicked his long-dormant survival instinct into gear, sure, but this is maybe the first time he’s truly understood the realisation that painted the could-have-been’s face. 

Pomni’s hand has moved from beside his on the sofa, and taken up mantle in the curve of his shoulder, present and warm. They’re alive, every single one of them. It’s not too late for the versions of themselves that they both were and have never been. 

So… fuck. 

Maybe it really isn’t too late for her either.

She doesn’t tell anyone straight away, even if a part of her aches to. She lets herself get used to the idea first, lets it turn over quietly in the background as the world around them changes. They start rearranging the circus, and Caine helps them with reconstruction—opening up the old adventure maps for free access, and talking to all of them about their own ideas for little pockets of themselves—like somewhere for Zooble to mix drinks, and for Gangle to draw. 

Somewhere down the line of it, Zooble suggests painting a mural of all the people who abstracted before them, a memorial for what they’ve lost along the way. They make scaffold-structures out of their longest unused parts, and spend days with Gangle painstakingly recreating faces that most of them have never even met. 

They get to Ribbit, on the last day, and she and Ragatha are sat down in front of the wall, watching the two work.

“Leave the eyelashes off,” she says, when Zooble has just gotten done with their lily pad pupils and has paused for moment to consider the reference picture. “They always said they’d get rid of them if she got the chance to change her avatar.”

Zooble turns to look at the two of them, surprised and contemplative. “Wait, you knew them?” It’s a fair enough question; the only person on the wall any of the others knew is Kaufmo, and neither she nor Ragatha had known any of the other people in the mural beyond him and them. 

“Yeah, we did.” she says, and she can feel the weight of Ragatha’s stare on her keenly. 

“What was their name?”

Jax thinks, for the briefest moment, about answering the question for herself. But Ragatha is staring at the side of her head, and she remembers the promise she’d forced the other woman to make like ash in her mouth. So instead, she turns to look at Ragatha, and just quiet enough not to be heard by the others, she says: “You tell them.”

Ragatha looks at her like she’s never seen her before. “You... really?” she murmurs, almost wary, as if convinced this is one final, twisted test to rub salt in a wound that’s barely had the chance to start healing. 

Jax, who doesn’t want to keep picking at the scab anymore, nods, and Ragatha takes the deep breath of a woman who’s finally about to lift a weight she’s been carrying for years off of her shoulders. “Ribbit,” she tells Zooble, airy and reverent. “Her name was Ribbit.”

It seems like that was all the encouragement Ragatha needed. The floodgates open, and they don’t stop sharing stories about them until Zooble has finished painting her entirely. And then they get onto Kaufmo, and they don’t stop until long after the mural is done. 

It’s funny; she’s spent so long avoiding their names—like speaking them into the open air would manifest a physically-weighted guilt for her to be crushed under—that she’d forgotten how easy they were to talk about. 

For the first time in a while, Jax goes back to her room, and when she walks in, the apparitions of herself are already waiting. The abstraction of herself looms at her bed, shadowed form swallowing the wall of turned-photos behind her, and the memory in the mirror is looking her dead in the eyes again. 

This time, she doesn’t close her eyes. 

“I’m not either of you,” she begins, trying not to feel stupid about effectively talking to herself, but it’s true. She could have been the girl in the mirror who never broke anything she couldn’t fix, or the girl who disappeared into shadows and starlight under the weight of it all, but she’s not. She can’t unwalk the paths that have parted them. She will never get the chance to be either of them; it’s too late. “But—but you’re both still me.” 

She’ll always recognise something of the girl in this mirror in her reflection, she’s sure. She’ll probably never get rid of the dreams and the visions in the corner of her eye of the apparition she could have been, that she’d seen mourned. Both of them are gone, in some way, and in another, both of them will live forever. 

The two impossible endings of herself stare at her from opposite sides of the room, and she’ll be seeing them for the rest of her life, but she thinks this is maybe the last time she’ll ever really see them. 

So, “I swear,” she says, looking them both in the eyes. For their sake, for the sake of all the people it’s too late for—“In another life, you are going to be happier than you ever could have imagined.”

And maybe it’s a promise to herself that she’s broken, before; maybe it’s going to take years, and she’s going have to have another hundred spirals and relapses along the way, and maybe she’ll look back sometimes and resent all the doors she closed on herself—but it is going to get better. The world around them has changed for the first time in years, and she’s different, too, more sure in herself than she’s ever been. 

For the first time since the circus fell apart, Jax blinks in the soft dark of the room, and when she opens her eyes again, the only version of herself in the room is her. It’s her reflection in the mirror, on the shadows of the walls. She looks the same as she always has, but as she leaves the room to a circus finally bursting back into full technicolour, she thinks it feels less like an unchangeable fact of her being, and more like a starting point. 

She goes to the aquarium on the day of its creation, long after the others have finished visiting, and finds Kinger still lingering in one of the tunnel rooms. It’s dark enough that he doesn’t need to close his eyes to think, and after a second of hesitance, she sits down next to him. If he notices anything different about her, he doesn’t mention it. 

“That’s Queenie.” Kinger tells her, in lieu of a greeting, looking up at the abstraction drifting in the water, eyeglow tinting the ocean blue into a soft, shifting technicolour. 

There’s nothing different about the abstraction’s form that gives it away. “How can you tell?” she asks. Kinger just smiles, in that squinted way he does that makes it obvious even without a mouth. 

“Sometimes you just know.”

She accepts that with a stilted hum, and they watch Queenie swim for a while, twisting through the water like a dancer and pulsing out bright waves of light. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think the abstracted woman was showing off. Eventually, however, she feels compelled to break the silence. “Do you think she’d have been happy with the way things are now?”

“I do,” he sighs wistfully, aching with warmth. “She’d have loved all of you, I’m sure of it.” Jax laughs, past the way the words make something in her chest and the lining of her eyes sting a little. 

“Even me?”

It’s a joke, the way she says it, but Kinger’s reply rings painfully sincere. “I think she’d be proud of you for finding the courage to do better. By the others… and by yourself.”

“Oh,” she murmurs softly, hand unconsciously reaching towards her ear. “Thanks.”

Queenie swims away, and Kinger stands to follow, but not before putting a hand briefly on her shoulder. He shuffles off into the distance, guided by the aftertrails of the love of his life, and she’s left alone in the aquarium tunnel. After a few minutes of careful quiet, two more abstractions glide through the water into view. They falter when they see her there, swimming up to the window close enough to watch her back, but distant enough not to encroach on the glass that separates them. They match each other almost perfectly.

She thinks she understands what Kinger means by just knowing. 

If this had been a different life, she thinks she’d have been in there with them, twisting hesitantly towards them, trying to get to know their shape again. The guilt wells in her chest when she thinks about what got the two of them to this point in the first place—everything she did, everything she didn’t do—but there’s nothing can she do to take back the mistakes she’s already made. There’s just the now, passing with every second that goes by, and the chiaroscuro silhouettes in front of her.

She fidgets with the bow on her ear. She’d had a long, hard debate with herself about wearing it, watching herself put it on in the mirror and thinking about the implications. In the end, she couldn’t settle for feeling just one thing about it. It’s both celebration and penance; an ode to the people who meant the world to her, and an apology that she didn’t see what they saw in herself in sooner—that she let it destroy what they’d had. 

She thinks about the vision that had nearly been; someone new who meant the world to her, who saw every open wound she’d scratched into herself and still held her until they both exploded in a prism-flash of light. A woman who’d been willing to fall apart with her, just so long as it meant she was still with her. 

She needs, more than anything, to stop making the same mistakes. 

She looks up at her old friends and smiles. “I’m sorry, Ribbit,” she says, watery and determined, breathing through every old instinct to choke on the words. “Thank you. My secret doesn’t have to be safe with you anymore.”

She gives them one last look before she goes, and feels their stares on her back the whole way down, hoping she’s said enough—that she will say enough. She needs to go find Pomni, after all. 

There’s something she needs to tell her. 

(Some small eternity of time later, there’s a completely unremarkable day where they’re all messing around at the beach, and Pomni sits down on the rocky pier next to her, staring into the water. Pomni’s head rests against her shoulder, and she leans in to meet it.)

(“Hey,” Pomni says, apropos of nothing. “You know what?”)

(“No. What?”)

(“I think it might be later now.”)

(She pauses, turning her head to look at the women next to her, a strange half-smile on her face that says a million things that neither of them have found the words for yet. “Is that so?”)

(“Yeah,” Pomni says, understanding anyway. “What do you think, do you feel like sticking around?”)

(She looks at the others spread out across the horizon, playing in the water. She looks down at her feet, gentle kicks sending small ripples through the stillness. She looks at the woman who, in another life, was willing to give up everything for her, just for the sake of giving her a chance.)

(“Yeah,” she says, watching this life bloom into being before them both. “I think I do.”)