Chapter Text
The silence hit Pomni first. After the chaos and madness she'd experienced getting past all of Jax's masks, and the flood of memories she'd been forced to witness as soon as she'd crossed the threshold, the deafening silence of the space beyond was an absolute shock to the system.
The vast, pitch-black void seemed to stretch on for infinity, an endless black sky devoid of any stars. There was no floor here. Only water, black and glassy, no deeper than a puddle, that was perfectly still until she took a tentative step forward. Splash. Sharp, neon-red ripples immediately bled outward, cutting through the darkness—a stark contrast against the absolute nothing that surrounded her.
Looking around, Pomni finally saw it in the distance; a single lamppost stood crooked in the water, flickering, casting a dim, purple hue that barely cut through the sea of black. The only fixed thing in the whole formless place.
Pomni set off towards it, not sure where else to go, disturbing the water and sending more ripples into the abyss.
"Jax?"
Her voice didn't echo. It just stopped, swallowed by the dark.
That's when she spotted it, the slightest movement of the figure hunched under the light.
She quickened her pace until she was running, lighting up the ground beneath her.
She finally reached him and flung her arms around his legs. He barely even moved from the impact.
"You shouldn't be here," he said flatly. No emotion in his voice whatsoever.
"Yeah, well." She snuggled further into his overalls. "I've never been great at doing what I should."
"You've seen everything now, you know what I've done. I don't deserve to live, everyone's better off without me."
"That's not true!" Pomni cried, tears spilling down her cheeks. "I just saw it, Jax — all of it, how much that guilt's been eating you alive this whole time. That's not nothing. People who don't care don't carry it like that."
"Go back, Pomni." He still hadn't turned around. "Please."
"You don't get to decide that for both of us." said Pomni stubbornly.
That got him to turn, and the sight of his face stopped her mid-step. His grin wasn't hidden or strained. It was simply gone, like the idea of it had been deleted along with whatever else was missing from him now. His eyes looked hollow and he looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
For the first time, Pomni realised she was finally seeing the real him, the one he kept buried beneath layers upon layers to protect himself.
This version was vulnerable, raw. Real.
"There's nothing left to go back to. The Circus is in ruins and it's even more of a hell than it was before!" He buried his face in his hands, refusing to look into her pleading eyes any longer.
"You shouldn't care about me anyway," Jax whispered, his ears drooping completely. "I'd just ruin you... just like I ruin everything else. It's too late… I did this to myself. There's no coming back from this."
"You don't know that! We can try to fix this, Jax, please—"
"Enough!" Jax barked, the first real emotion he'd shown since she got there. The lamppost flickered wildly and for a second his form seemed to glitch and distort, spikes forming across his body until it calmed into its usual smoothness.
Pomni flinched back in horror, before tentatively holding his legs again.
Slowly, hesitantly, he turned, knelt down and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her against him in a sudden, desperate embrace.
"You can't stay," he said, very quietly, into the top of her head. "You hear me? I'm not — I already killed Ribbit and Kaufmo. I do that to you too." His arms tightened anyway.
As Pomni hugged him back, she noticed the neon ripples spreading all around their bodies, despite the fact that they were not moving. Then she felt it, the slight shudder and hitching of breath from the man in her arms.
Jax was crying.
They stayed like that for a while. Long enough that the quiet almost felt survivable.
Then she felt it, not here, not in this fog and lamplight, but somewhere else entirely. A hand, real and solid, closing around her actual shoulder in the world she'd left her body in. She knew that grip.
Zooble. The others were trying to reach her.
"They're pulling me back."
"P-please s-stay, just a little longer." he choked between sobs.
"Not without you. Come back with me." She pulled back enough to look up at him, gripping his hand in both of hers now. "Right now. We'll figure the rest out together, I promise, just come on—"
"I don't wanna go!" his voice cracking as he spoke.
"Jax, come on!" Pomni cried, trying to pull him with her, but he held his ground like an anchor, refusing to budge.
As the physical pull from the outside world grew stronger, panic flared in Jax's hollow eyes. "Please… d-don't go," he wept, open tears finally spilling down his face. "Not yet!"
The lamppost shattered.
It went without warning, whole and flickering one second and blown outward the next in a bright spray of glass that hissed down through the red-tinged water, and in the sudden dark Jax came apart.
"I don't wanna be alone!" he shrieked as his form distorted once again, sharp, jagged edges forming on his skin as his hands sharpened into claws and dug into Pomni's back in a desperate attempt to keep her with him.
Pomni shrieked with pain as the quiet puddle around their feet turned violent, rising rapidly, churning into a deep, turbulent sea as his emotions spiralled.
It happened the way nightmares do, all at once and too slowly to escape: the puddle around their ankles surging upward, black and red and churning, past her knees, her waist, her chest, until the ground vanished beneath them. Pomni and Jax plunged into the dark depths, sinking rapidly as if they had fallen straight into the ocean.
She couldn't breathe. She opened her mouth to scream and nothing came, no sound at all, just the dark rushing in where her voice should have been. Somewhere in the churn Jax was still holding on, his hand, no longer entirely a hand, locked around her wrist as his whole form began to break into drifting, glowing squares of light.
And then so did she.
It started at her fingertips, where he gripped her, her own edges softening into that same static, and spread inward faster than she could fight it. She couldn't tell where the water ended and the pixels began. She couldn't tell which scattering fragments were hers and which were his. Their code bled together into one indistinguishable, drowning swirl.
And in the middle of it, she felt him. Not heard. Felt, whole, the way you feel your own heartbeat.
Exhaustion, deep and bone-old. A guilt so heavy it had stopped feeling like guilt and started feeling like the shape of him. The certainty, absolute and unarguable from the inside, that every person who had ever looked at him had been quietly relieved to look away.
And under that, smaller, and somehow worse: her. The way he'd looked forward to her being in a room. How easily she'd made him laugh when he wasn't performing it. The flinch of fear whenever he noticed how much he liked her, because the last person who'd stood too close to him had ended up a ruin of glitching static in a padded room. Every time he'd pushed her away, sharp and cruel on purpose, and hated himself before the words had even finished leaving his mouth.
There were the quieter moments too.
Sitting beside her when neither of them had anything particularly interesting to say. Watching her get frustrated over some ridiculous adventure and trying not to laugh when she inevitably made things worse. The way she would look at him sometimes, not with the wary suspicion everyone else had learned to give him, but with a strange, almost stubborn belief that there was more to him than what he showed.
He remembered how easy it had become to seek her out.
How he'd started noticing where she was before he'd even realised he was looking.
How he'd lingered a little longer whenever she was around, finding some excuse to keep the conversation going even when there was nothing left to say. How her laughter had begun to feel different from everyone else's—not something to provoke or perform for, but something he wanted to hear simply because it was hers.
There were moments he'd caught himself smiling at her without thinking, moments when he'd forgotten, just for a second, that he was supposed to be Jax and then he'd remembered what happened when someone got too close.
Remembered Ribbit.
Remembered the terror of watching someone he cared about disappear into something he couldn't save.
So he'd shoved Pomni away. Again. And again.
Every cruel joke had been easier to say than the truth. Every time she'd looked hurt, he'd hated himself for being relieved that she'd take the hint.
Because if she hated him, she couldn't get close.
If she stayed away, she couldn't end up like Ribbit, and if he never admitted what she was becoming to him, then losing her wouldn't hurt nearly as much.
Except it already did.
He remembered the first time she'd hugged him.
The warmth of her against him.
The absurd, terrifying thought that he could have stayed there forever, how he'd wanted to hold her tighter and hadn't dared, how he'd wanted to tell her that she mattered to him.
How he'd wanted to tell her that, somehow, she'd become one of the few things in this place he genuinely looked forward to.
He'd never said any of it. Not once. And now she was here anyway, still trying to bring him home.
Even after everything he'd done.
Even after he'd tried so hard to make her hate him.
I'm sorry, something in the static said, and she couldn't tell anymore if it was him or some drowned echo of herself. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I just wanted you to be safe—
The pull came one last time, enormous, a hand closing around everything she still was and yanking with everything it had.
Pomni felt something tear through her, not flesh, something deeper as her code ripped away from his. The darkness exploded and Pomni was thrown upwards.
"JAX—"
She broke the surface of the void screaming his name into air that finally, finally let sound exist again, and then there was no water at all, only the hard, ordinary floor of the circus rushing up to meet her.
******
She hit the ground gasping, every part of her lit up with a wrongness she didn't have words for. Hands were on her at once, Kinger's, Ragatha's, Gangle's, all of them talking over each other.
"You didn't think we'd let you deal with him alone, right?" Zooble's voice was rough, and they were gripping her shoulder like they had no intention of ever letting go.
Pomni's throat closed. "You guys," she managed, and then she was crying, helplessly, into whatever arm was nearest.
Across the tent, Jax had stopped moving.
He'd stumbled back the instant she was ripped away from him, collapsing into a heap, making no sound beyond a small distressed noise. His multiple eyes drifted unfocused around the room, as if he wasn't sure where he was or how he'd got there. The jagged edges of his body had smoothed out almost completely and he became entirely docile, his rage completely drained.
"Why's he quiet?" Ragatha whispered.
Nobody had an answer. Nobody relaxed, either.
There was no one to snap their fingers and make anything simple. There hadn't been for a long time now, not since the Circus had learned to keep going without Caine, badly, in fits and starts, everyone doing their best with none of his shortcuts. Pomni understood that, somewhere underneath the pain. Understanding it didn't make it hurt less.
Heavy glitches kept crawling up through her, sharp flares of corrupted static that caught in her joints and made even breathing something to be fought for. When she tried to stand, her leg gave out, less like weakness than like a wire cut halfway through, and she went down hard enough that Zooble was there before she'd finished falling.
"Okay. You're not walking on that." Zooble's voice was clipped, the way it got when they were scared and covering for it. They were already wrenching a length of their own frame loose with a grimace, reshaping it, click by click, into something she could lean on. "Here. Use this. Don't you dare say you're fine."
"I wasn't going to."
The crutch helped, a little. Enough to get upright, enough to hobble to the main area and watch, leaning her whole weight on Zooble's borrowed parts, as the others led Jax's hulking, monstrous form across the sand and into the large marquee they had built to hold him.
He went without resistance, simply accepted being led by Zooble and the others, offering no objections to the rope of arms secured around his neck like a dog on a lead.
She stood there useless, glitches shooting through her, so sharp that twice she had to stop and grit her teeth while her vision split into overlapping frames.
She wanted to tell them what she'd seen. She wanted to say he isn't dangerous, he's terrified. But the words wouldn't line up, and there was still so much of him tangled up inside her head that she wasn't sure which parts were hers.
******
Kinger did what he could, which wasn't much, and he seemed to know it.
He sat her down in a corner of the tent, the battered bucket he wore over his head tipped back off his brow so he could see, and hovered both hands over the worst of the flickering without quite touching it, the way you'd hover a hand over a stove you didn't trust to be off.
"I can read it," he said, half to her, half to himself. "I know what's supposed to connect to what. I just — I don't know avatars, Pomni. Not really. Not like this. If I pull the wrong thread I could make it so much worse, and I am not willing to risk that, not with you."
"You won't." she breathed, though a sharp stitch of red static shot up her neck, making her jaw lock up.
"You don't know that. I don't know that." But he tried anyway, careful, one thread at a time, coaxing a stutter still here, smoothing a flicker there. For a while it even seemed to hold. Then a seam would slip loose somewhere else and the glitch would crawl right back out, and Kinger would go very still and very quiet under his bucket before trying again.
"Better?" he asked, for the fourth time.
"Better," Pomni lied. Then, more honestly: "A little."
He didn't look convinced. He looked, if anything, more afraid than when he'd started.
After that, nobody seemed to know where to go, so they drifted back to the main area and ended up on the couches, the way people do when there's nothing left to do but sit.
Gangle helped Pomni onto the largest one, easing her down along its length; the glitches licked at Gangle's ribbons where their hands touched, but mercifully didn't spread.
Zooble sat with their arms folded, watching the tent flap like it might do something. Ragatha kept starting sentences and abandoning them. Gangle had folded herself up small at the couch's end. Nobody mentioned the marquee. It was quiet from that direction, and the quiet was somehow worse than noise would have been.
"So," Ragatha said eventually, her voice cracking as she forced herself to break the silence. "What do we do now?"
Nobody had an answer.
The silence stretched long enough to turn brittle. It was Zooble who finally broke it, and not gently.
"What were you thinking?" They rounded on Pomni, arms unfolding. "Tackling Jax all by yourself, no warning, no backup — did you even have a plan, or did you just wing it and hope for the best?"
"I had a plan." Pomni shifted slightly, wincing as a pulse of purple noise rippled down her spine. "I remembered something Kinger had told me when he was lucid in the Mildenhall Manor adventure. About how he was able to touch his abstracted wife."
The room went very still in a different way.
"You had a—" Zooble turned. Ragatha's mouth had fallen open. Even Gangle looked up, startled out of her small, folded shape. None of them had known. None of them had ever heard the word wife out of Kinger, not once.
"I...did?" Kinger blinked, bucket sliding forward on his head. "I don't— I don't remember talking about that." He frowned, eyes shifting slightly as if searching his mind for any shred of memory from that adventure and coming up blank. He looked back up at everyone and saw them watching him expectantly for him to continue.
"Well…after she abstracted, we ended up together in a pillow fort somehow. I don't remember the specifics, but the darkness seemed to calm her down. Her edges smoothed out and she wasn't — she wasn't aggressive anymore. She wasn't really herself, but calm enough that I could touch her, one last time." His voice had gone very quiet. "Before Caine put her in the cellar."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Nobody quite knew where to look.
"Right!" Pomni said, nodding weakly. "So I thought — if it worked for her, maybe it'd work for Jax. Get him somewhere dark and maybe it'd calm him down enough to try to get through to him."
"If you'd told me your plan," Ragatha said, something raw under the words, "I would have helped. I would have gone with you."
"We all would," Kinger agreed, his bucket tilting down in a rare, somber gesture of solidarity.
"I felt like it was my responsibility." Pomni's voice cracked on the last word, and she had to stop and breathe before she could finish. "He came to me, a little while before he — before it happened." She choked back a sudden wave of tears, her throat tightening before she could continue. "It looked like he wanted to talk, then he just — lost his nerve, right at the end, and walked away." Her hands twisted in her lap. "I should have pushed. Gone after him right then. But I thought if I gave him space, he'd come back when he was ready."
Ragatha reached over and set a hand on her knee, not even flinching when the glitches crawled briefly across her fingers. "That's not your fault. Jax has never known how to let anyone in. Trying to force him would have only made him pull away further."
Pomni smiled back up at the ragdoll, a small, fragile expression of gratitude cutting through her pain.
"I wish I'd done more too." Zooble's arms had come back around themselves, tighter now. "I knew he wasn't acting like himself. I even wondered if he was headed toward abstracting, and I just—." Zooble sighed. "He was a total jerk…but that doesn't mean I wanted him dead."
"He wasn't always mean," Ragatha said, her voice dropping into a nostalgic whisper. "When he first arrived, he was so scared and shy. It took a while to get him to come out of his shell and when he did…he was still a jokester and prankster, there was no malice behind it. Things didn't change until later. I don't know what happened exactly, but he had some kind of fight with a friend of his - one of the previous circus members."
Ragatha squeezed her eyes shut, pulling her arms around herself. "After that he just…changed. Pushed them away. When they abstracted, he just got worse, pushed everyone away and started being mean to everyone. I always hoped one day he'd go back to the way he was before. I always wondered…if there was something I could have done to prevent it."
Pomni fidgeted with the pompom at her chest, working through whether to say what came next. Jax kept things close to the chest; some instinct told her that hadn't changed just because he wasn't here to object. But they deserved to know she'd actually reached him, at least. That much, at least, was hers to share.
"I did actually manage to connect with him," she said finally.
Everyone looked up at her in utter shock.
“WHAT?!” they all shouted in unison, Kinger’s bucket nearly flying off his head from the sudden jolt.
“Yeah," Pomni nodded, her heart hammering against her ribs. "I actually went into Jax’s mind. I talked to him.”
There was a pause as everyone absorbed this new information, before Gangle timidly spoke up.
"What was it like?" Gangle asked very quietly, her hollow eyes fixed on the floor, her ribbons trembling. "In there. With him."
Pomni didn't answer right away. She could still feel the shape of it, half memory and half something that had never quite belonged to her in the first place — his exhaustion, his certainty that everyone would be relieved to see him gone, the guilt that had nothing left of him underneath it.
"Finding him was the hard part," she said at last. "I had to get past all the masks he put up first. Twisted versions of reality and extreme scenarios he uses to protect himself. Looking back, I think I saw each of those masks come out at some point." A faint, unsteady almost-laugh escaped her. "Did you know Jax can play piano?"
For a second, nobody quite knew what to do with that. Then Ragatha let out a wet, startled laugh of her own, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. "Piano. Of course he can. Of course that would be something he would hide."
"That little—" Zooble shook their head, something almost fond breaking through the grimness for just a moment. "Figures he'd never once mention it."
The moment passed as quickly as it had come.
"Once I found him under all that..." Pomni's voice dropped. "It was a sad sight. He didn't want to come back." Her eyes blurred, and she didn't bother blinking it away, looking between Ragatha and Gangle. "He thought — he actually thought you'd all be better off without him. That no one wanted him. That he was alone either way, so what did it matter. He told me he ruins everything he touches."
Ragatha buried her face in her hands, letting out a soft, trembling sob that shook her whole frame. Gangle’s glassy tears started falling again, leaving wet trails down her tragedy mask as she silently wept. Even Zooble looked away, their mismatched shoulders tense. They were mourning him—not the bully who stole their keys and broke their things, but the broken person who had been hiding underneath the sarcasm all along.
"I saw pieces of his memories, too. Felt what he was feeling." Pomni pressed her hands flat against her knees, steadying herself. "I won't go into everything. But — before he ever came to the Circus, he did something bad. It was an accident, but… he regretted it enough to run away from home and live on the streets rather than confront it. I saw the fight with Ribbit, too—"
Ragatha snapped her head up, eye wide with surprise. "Y-you did?"
“Who’s Ribbit?” Zooble asked, looking between them.
“The friend I told you about,” Ragatha explained quietly, wiping her eyes. “The one who abstracted just before Gangle arrived.”
"He told her what happened," Pomni said, looking down at the couch cushions. "Plus a few other things which he instantly regretted sharing. He was convinced they’d use it against him, so he just kept pushing further away every time they brought the subject up. He feels so guilty about how he treated her. About how he treated everyone."
Her throat tightened. "I tried everything to get him to come with me. He wouldn't even try."
"He's an idiot," Zooble said, voice rough. Then, quieter: "He's not wrong that things are a mess. But he's wrong about the rest of it."
Nobody argued that first part.
Ragatha wrapped her arms around herself. "I keep thinking he's just — off somewhere, being difficult, and he'll turn back up and be awful about it and everything'll go back to normal. But he's right there." She glanced toward the marquee. "He's right there and he's still gone. Is that stupid?"
"No," Pomni said. "It's not stupid at all."
It didn't feel like the kind of grief that had an ending you could point to. He hadn't died. He was fifty feet away, breathing, real. But something about him had left anyway, and there was nowhere to put that, no ritual for missing someone who was still in the room.
They sat with it a while, nobody quite looking at anybody else.
After a long silence, Zooble shifted in their seat. "Hey — did you ever figure out what the corn thing was about?"
Pomni managed a small, tired smile. "Not from his memories, no. From talking to him before, he seems to have some kind of trypophobia. I don't know where it came from, though."
Nobody laughed this time. It just felt good, for a moment, to talk about him like a person instead of a problem to solve.
Pomni shifted, trying to work some of the discomfort out of her limbs, and the glitches flared sharp along her side for it.
And then, all at once, the static went out of her.
It didn't build. It didn't warn her. One second the glitches were still crawling under her skin, and the next they simply weren't there anymore — the flickering gone, the pain drained clean out of her, her body suddenly, disorientingly her own again. She sat bolt upright so fast the couch creaked, both hands pressed to her own chest like she needed proof.
"It stopped." Her voice came out startled. "It just — it stopped."
Confusion, not relief, rippled through the others. Kinger's bucket tipped as he looked up sharply; whatever this was, it plainly hadn't come from him.
Caine floated over to them, head hung low and holding his staff in front of him, wringing it worriedly. He landed a short distance away rather than closing the space between them — close enough to be heard, far enough to not be a threat, like he understood, even before anyone said a word, that closer wouldn't be welcome yet.
The room went very still. Zooble was on their feet before Pomni had finished sitting up, planted between Caine and the rest of them, weight balanced and ready, not lunging, not yet, but plainly prepared to if it came to that.
"I- I understand that you're afraid. And you have no reason to trust me after all I've done. But I've been doing a lot of thinking and… I realised how wrong I was. For what it's worth, I really did try to make you happy, but I didn't really understand enough about humans to do that."
He sighed, "I've learned a lot about you and your world. I understand now that keeping you under my thumb just isn't right. I'm sorry."
They sat silently for a moment. Then, of all of them, it was Ragatha who spoke.
"...For what it's worth," she said, quietly, "I don't think it was only you."
Caine looked up, plainly surprised.
"You always tried so hard to make us happy," Ragatha went on. "But…we didn't appreciate your efforts, were too harsh with criticism. I know what it feels like to try your best and feel unappreciated for it." She rubbed her arm, she could practically hear her mother's criticism in her head. "But that doesn't excuse anything. I think our biggest issue is communication."
Something moved in Caine's throat. Whatever he'd braced himself to hear, it plainly hadn't been that.
"Caine... You really caused a lot of hell for us. It's gonna take some time to build up any kind of trust between us again. But, despite all that, It's good to have you back." said Zooble casually.
"R-really? You'll give me another chance?! Hot dog! You have my word that I'll try to make my adventures better-"
"No!" Zooble immediately cut in, but before they could say anything scathing, Pomni stepped in.
"Maybe, if you truly want to understand humans, you could be like one of us, instead?"
"You don't have to live to serve us or entertain us. We could all have equal control over the Circus. Be on equal footing, so to speak."
"I-I could…be one of you guys?!" Caine's eyes grew impossibly big and filled with tears "That's all I ever wanted! It makes me so happy that-"
Caine suddenly bluescreened.
The others stared at him in various degrees of concern. "Should we be concerned about that?" Gangle asked
Kinger chuckled "Nah, let him have his moment."
Eventually he snapped out of it and returned to his normal self.
"Okay, I will give you all control of this place. We'll make this a better place…together."
His gaze drifted past them then, sweeping the tent, and Pomni watched something shift in his expression — counting, she realized. Counting heads.
His eyes caught on the marquee, blankets and salvaged canvas stacked into something that hadn't been there before, and he tilted, curious.
"What, uh — what happened here?" He glanced around properly now, taking in the small repairs, the rest of the place otherwise untouched. "And where's Jax? He should really hear this too."
Nobody answered right away. It was Gangle who finally spoke, voice small.
"Jax abstracted, Caine. We — we didn't know what else to do, so we built somewhere to keep him safe, until—" She didn't finish it.
Caine's face fell, entirely unrehearsed. "Oh." His hand rose, fingers already curling toward a snap out of pure habit. "Uh, did you need any help with...?"
"No." Pomni was on her feet before she'd decided to be, sharper than she meant. "I mean — no. I think he's better off where he is. For now."
Caine paused, confused, but didn't push it. He lowered his hand slowly, studying her a beat too long, like he was cataloguing something he didn't have words for yet.
"...Alright." He cleared his throat, and the old showman's polish crept carefully back into his voice, smaller than it used to be. "I've... made something for you. Uh, feel free to join me by the stage whenever you're ready."
He didn't wait for an answer, simply floating away across the tent. After a few moments looking at each other in confusion, they made their way to the stage, curious to see what the ringmaster had to show them.
******
When they reached the stage, they saw that Caine had set up a projector screen with a couch directly in front, which they tentatively sat on, waiting for whatever Caine had planned.
One by one, he showed them. Faces that weren't quite their own and yet unmistakably were. Names none of them had heard spoken aloud in longer than any of them could remember. Ragatha pressed a hand to her mouth. Gangle went very still. Zooble said nothing at all for a long time.
When Jax's file came up, it was a face Pomni had never met and recognized instantly all the same — same energy and zany personality coming through the pictures, devoid of the pain and guilt that had weighed him down within the digital walls.
Something in her chest cracked clean open. She hadn't expected it to hurt this much, seeing the shape of who he might have been before any of this. Before Ribbit. Before the Circus had worn him down into someone who thought disappearing was the kindest thing left he could do.
Caine didn't make them take it all in at once. He let it come in pieces, over the days that followed, whenever someone could stand to ask for more. Slowly, unevenly, the Circus found its way toward something like a new normal — not the old, resentful peace they'd limped along on before, and not the raw, open wound of losing Jax either, but some third thing sitting in between, everyone learning how to live in the space Caine had finally, belatedly, made room for.
A funeral was held for Jax a few days later. Pomni, honestly, hadn't felt ready for it — it was a strange thing, mourning someone who was still technically just across the sand, breathing, real — but she had to admit, in the end, it was surprisingly nice. Everyone found something kind to say about him. Even Gangle, despite everything he'd put her through, found something.
After that, life in the Circus moved on.
For a day, then two, Pomni felt fine, no sign of glitches or pain. She walked without the crutch, and the Circus went on adjusting to him being back the slow, uneven way it was adjusting to everything now — nobody quite trusting the ground under their feet, but nobody willing to give up the chance to try again, either.
Then, on the fourth night, the glitches came back.
Not as badly, not at first. A flicker down one arm, a stutter in her vision, a wave of that old sharp pain. Caine fixed it in a snap and frowned at nothing.
A week later, again. Then again, and again, until Pomni stopped counting the visits and started simply expecting them, the way you expect a leak in the same place after every rain. Each time Caine fixed her, muttering to himself, the calm cracking a little more.
"It's fine," she told him after the last one. "It's just leftover damage from Jax."
"It should have cleared by now," Caine said. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at his own hands, like they'd started to lie to him.
That night, lying very still and very awake, another glitch ran through her. Small, quiet, nothing like the violent corruption from before. Softer. Almost gentle, in a way that didn't belong anywhere near the word glitch at all.
For one strange, suspended moment it felt less like an error and more like a pulse. A tiny digital heartbeat that wasn't hers, settling just beneath her sternum, right where the ache had first taken root.
She pressed a hand to her chest, waited, felt nothing else.
Just leftover corruption from the fix, she told herself. It's nothing.
She closed her eyes, and did not think about it again.