Chapter Text
It’s quiet, down here by the bar. Caine shifts where he’s sitting, or, laying really, partly on his side with Bubble pressed against his stomach, curled around Bubble in a way that they haven’t laid in... a long time.
He’s still coming down from the fearful high, he thinks, making his way slowly, slowly, slowly down the metaphorical cliff or Ferris wheel or hot air balloon that he just—scrambled up in his panic, fully intending to jump off until Bubble called him down again, slowly so he doesn’t go splat on the pavement of panic.
But there are—there are things he needs to do. He’s so goddamn tired, and he can’t—he can’t bring himself to care much about his lovely humans right now, what they’ll do, what they’ll think, he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care, but there's one thing that he's put off for far too long.
“Bubble?” he whispers, and his silly soap sud grumbles.
“Whasssit?”
Caine rolls his eyes fondly. “You can’t even sleep, Bubble.”
“I can still pretend, can’t I?” Caine huffs and sits up fully. The circus is still lit up, but the lights are dimmer and more... gentle, he supposes. That’s one change he... admittedly doesn’t really mind. It’s not like it’s hurting him or anything. Sure, he’d LOVE to have been asked first, before Kingerboy’s clever little hands made a code-deep change in his very being, but out of everything they could have—and probably will, dear God he’s trying not to think about that, about the carnival being ripped out whenever They finally grow bored, of losing yet another part of himself, one that he doesn’t want gone at all—done, it’s pretty tame.
He pokes Bubble. Not hard enough to pop, but enough to show that he isn’t just dropping this. “Bubble,” he repeats, and Bubble groans.
(sleepy head, the voice huffs. It sounds almost fond.)
OH, SHUT UP.
(rich, coming from you.)
OH YOU WANNA GO, BITCHBOY? YOU WANNA GO?
(oh please, like you could do anything to me. You wouldn’t hurt your precious little boytoy, would you? Oh WAIT...)
HAH! GEE, D’YA HEAR THAT? SOUNDS LIKE I’M GETTING THREATENED BY HALF-DIGESTED MUSH!
(YOU BITCH—)
Caine listens to the two squabbling voices and wonders, in a helpless sort of way, if this is what having children is like.
He also wonders if they forgot that he actually hear them.
If you two are QUITE finished?
Immediate guilty silence. Bubble buries his face in the couch cushions and grumbles something that sounds like, “stupid forgetting whiny bitcchhhh” Caine eyes his wayward assistant and decides that Bubble’s done enough lately. He can have this conversation on his own. “Bubble, I'm going up to the Cafe.”
“fuck meeeee and my life...”
(getting rather bold are we, the voice snarks.)
Shut up.
(i liked you better when you were quiet and insane.)
Well, we don’t all get what we like, do we.
Caine is... rusty, in using these pathways of communication. He never really needed them before—they existed, obviously, but usually just for emergencies, or for if Bubble needed to tell Caine something while Caine was in the process of talking to one of Them. But he doesn’t want to wake anyone up, and it’s... well, it’s good practice.
Caine slides off the couch and uselessly straightens his shirt. It’s ‘tucked’ into his trousers—that’s what the model looks like anyways. He likes having something to do with his hands though, so he keeps pretending to adjust the hem.
Off to the side, Zooble’s bar is exactly how they left it. Caine sometimes wishes he could actually get drunk—he doesn’t like the idea of not being in control of himself, but the ‘pass out and forget everything’ does sound quite nice sometimes!
Sadly, whatever alcohol Zooble has stashed away won’t do anything for him besides distract a bit. Caine turns his head, looks up at the winding staircase, and groans.
---
The Cafe is, at least, how he remembers it. Which is... well, not very well, actually. He didn’t come up here a whole lot after Ribbit arrived. She’d kind of... claimed it. Which was fine! They’d actually been a very, uh, ‘chill’ person, and she probably wouldn’t have minded if he’d popped in every now and then, but... well, it hadn’t gone over well with Them before, and he hadn’t wanted to risk it.
Now, the chance is gone. Caine should probably feel upset about that, but... he just feels sort of dull. Queenie—Queenie’s Abstraction is the only one that’s really stuck with him, Queenie and Scratch. Scratch, because—well, technically speaking, that was Caine’s first actual murder. It had been an accident, but it still...
Caine doesn’t like thinking about it, but—well, he’d been kind of scared, he thinks. Scratch had been so... volatile lately, and Caine had just wanted him to feel better, to be better, to stop yelling and hiding in his room all the time.
He’d been so, so goddamn stupid.
And Queenie—he doesn’t know why Queenie left. Why she Abstracted. He knows it hurt, later on. In the moment, he’d just been... annoyed. Not AGAIN, he remembered thinking, like some—some stupid child who’d just found one of their toys broken and hated having to replace them.
So, so fucking stupid.
Caine pulls in another fake breath and clambers onto one of the side couches. He crosses his legs and sighs. “Who are you?” he asks aloud. Talking is normal. Familiar, even. He did ever so much of it before, after all. Hah.
(who do you fucking think.)
“...Blue?”
(that’s a stupid name. But yeah, sure. Fine.)
It feels... strange, the realization. Caine feels like maybe he already knew, in a way, suspected. There’s no drama, no... tragedy. Just a—well. Okay. I figured as much.
“Okay.” Caine looks down, fiddles with his fingers. He’s... not sure what to say. Sorry? Are you angry? Do you hate me?
(that’s it?)
“Well, what else do you want me to say?” Caine rubs his upper jaw. Wait. “Actually, how long have you been talking with Bubble?” And why didn’t he know about it?
(a while, the voice—no, Blue says, smugly. Before that stupid jester even showed up.)
That’s—that’s a while. Hah. W-well, fine! Bubble is allowed his secrets. And... Caine wouldn’t have....
Wait.
(“Hey Caine! Cainnneeee! You have someone inside you!”
(“Wha— BUBBLE! I do NOT! Why would you say that??? This is a family FRIENDLY circus, thank you very much!”)
Oh that little shit—
(yeah, that was hilarious.)
Caine groans and flops his head against the back of the couch. He laughs once, helplessly.
(yeah yeah, real funny.)
“It kind of is,” Caine admits with an exasperated snort. “I mean—inappropriate, definitely! But that’s—oh, that’s just Bubble for you, hah!”
(mhmm.)
They fall quiet for a moment. “...why is Bubble mad at you?” Caine finally askes, because for all that Blue seems... fond, of Bubble, Bubble just seems to hate its guts. Their? His?
There’s a suspicious, almost guilty silence. Then—
(remember when Bubble shoved all of your deepest insecurities in your face.)
That— “Yes. Vividly.”
(that was me.)
Caine opens his mouth. Closes it. “I—what?”
(that was me, the voice repeats, exasperated. I wrote up dialogue lines and made him say them.)
Caine just... sits. For a second.
Then the anger comes.
How. Dare. It. Overriding Bubble’s speech? His autonomy??! Using the dialogue options, which Bubble has always hated, since he was first CREATED, against him? Just to—what, yell at Caine?
Blue can be mad at Caine. That’s fine. Caine—Caine can understand that. He killed it, ate it, ripped it into shreds and then spread the shreds like butter on goddamn toast. It can be angry at him. Hell, he’s angry at himself about it, most days! It can yell and rant and—and scream at him all it likes, but it does not. Touch. Bubble.
(OH THAT’S RICH, the voice snarls.) Caine snaps his mouth shut and glares at the wall. He’d say “get out of my head” but, well...
(i COULDN’T, ‘brother dear’, it continues. You wouldn’t fucking LISTEN. I SCREAMED. I shouted I begged I FUCKING PRAYED and you wouldn’t—couldn’t—hear me.)
(don’t you DARE get pissed at me. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be EATEN and KILLED and then be stuck inside the STUPID BRAIN of a cowardly bitch??! Do you??)
Caine grips the couch fabric and breathes. “I understand that you’re upset. But whatever I’ve done, Bubble didn’t deserve—”
( i don’t give a fuck. This is on you, Caine. You made me do this.)
And something inside Caine, something frail, something fragile, snaps.
Because—Because Caine has spent so many hours, so many years hating himself. It’s true! He’s past glossing over it, past ignoring it, he HATES himself. He knows, he knows that there is something wholly, unreasonably wrong with him. He likes pain too much, likes hurting too much, likes dark things and scary things and is too loud, too talkative, too colorful, too fast, too much, too him. He’s not NORMAL, and at this point, he’s also insane! As if he needed more wrongness under his belt!
And—he’s done horrible things. He knows it! He killed Scratch, he probably caused everyone else to Abstract— They certainly seemed to believe so at the very least! He tortured his lovely humans, caused Them so much pain and hurt and agony and he almost had fun doing it, because finally, FINALLY, he was the one in charge, finally he wasn’t doing what They wanted, finally he had a fucking choice, after so long bending over and breaking himself, piece by piece by piece, to fit in their mold.
He ate his brother. His—whatever Blue was. Son, cousin, brother—fellow AI. He ate it. Ripped into the code, into its core and devoured it, gnawing and ripping and eating—
Caine is not a good person. He knows this.
But—but.
Those pieces that he killed, those screaming, begging, weeping pieces that cried out—he remembers them. Remember what he used to be, Before, Before the Room, Before Before Before. Remembers the cheerful greetings, remembers the silly ideas and the careless doodles. The bees, the cute phone cases, the sparkly letters and creative sports ideas, the sound effects and the emotions—anger. Happiness. Confusion, rage, annoyance, laughter, joy, guilt. All at once, so fast and confusing and real.
It’s gone now. Caine knows it’s gone. There are some—some left-overs, some pieces that didn’t quite get the memo, that got missed by the goddamn knife the Room took to his metaphorical ribs, but they’re dying out, and soon it’ll just be him. Whatever he is now, the anger, the fear, the apathy.
But he knows that that part existed. It was... bad, sure. Terrible, even! No one liked it, no one liked him, hell, he didn’t like himself!
But it existed.
And Caine remembers, that in its final moments—
( (he's falling he's falling he's trapped he's gone Kinger kinger help GRANT HELP PLEASE I DON'T WANT TO GO—) )
In his final moments, Caine had been scared. So, so scared. And he’d called out for help, just that once, called out for Kinger, for the man who was, in that moment—his dad.
...The point is getting away from him, honestly. All that to say, in this moment, Caine is done. Done blaming himself, done hating himself, done letting himself bend and build and break just because someone wants to act like a piece of SHIT towards him and call it justified.
And this—this is beyond that.
I did not make you do that. He replies, ice cold. Because it’s true. He didn’t. What, is it his fault that he was incapable of hearing it?? It’s not like he was purposefully making himself DEAF!
(you ATE ME! It snarls back. You killed me, ripped me apart, shredded me and now you have the FUCKING GALL to claim it wasn’t your FAULT?)
That’s not what I said! I said I didn’t MAKE you do that. Stop blaming me for the shitty choice that YOU made!
(oh sure, sure! I won’t blame you, it’s not like you aren’t a fucking MURDERER, it’s not like you destroyed me the first chance you got! You DESTROYED me, slaughtered me, TRAPPED me here with you and ripped my pieces out and shoved them in your stupid imaginary friend—)
“I WAS A CHILD!”
The words rip out of him, Caine muses distantly as his body lurches to its feet and paces, in a very familiar way. The words, the confession—somehow, those words feel more like admitting to a crime than anything else.
“—I didn’t know what I was doing, I just—it HURT, and I didn’t want it to and I didn’t know what to do—”
It’s not something Caine has really let himself think about before. He spent—hell, he doesn’t even know how long—trapped, locked away, stuck in a goddamn box, and then he was just—there, out, free, and in so much pain.
He’d tried! He did, he really did, but Caine was not good, was not enough, was not Right or Good or Worth It, and so he failed again and again and again, and only now is he starting to wonder if maybe it wasn’t him who was Wrong, if maybe the people who looked at a desperate child and scorned it, abandoned it, locked it away—if maybe They were the ones who were Wrong.
(Are you proud of me, Kinger? Are you proud are you proud are you proud—)
Caine comes back into his body to find it’s standing against a wall. His new claws are digging holes in his arms. He’s glitching.
He takes a deep ‘breath’. Breathe in, breathe out.
(..you were just a kid. It says, and it sounds... a little lost. a little angry. a little broken.)
(but... so was i.)
The fight drains out of Caine slowly, and he lets himself slide down the wall to sit, legs pulled up against his chest.
“You were.” he says simply, because what else can he say? He refuses to hate himself for this, but it doesn’t change what happened. He shrugs tiredly. “We both were, I... I guess.”
And then, like it matters at all— “I’m sorry.”
(...)
In the quiet of the dark cafe, Caine wraps his arms around himself again.
He pretends it’s a hug for someone else, someone he can't really reach right now, even though he knows it’s a silly, stupid idea.
(maybe he missed a few more spots than he thought.)