Chapter Text
Breaking apart, splitting at the seams — the walls turn inward, black and speckled with thousands of ringed, neon lights. Eyes. Pupils. They roll in their sockets frantically before all landing inward, bending toward her.
Pomni drags in a harsh breath. She can barely let it out.
Hands around her throat.
Blown pupils swallowing yellow, swallowing her, swallowing, swallowing, devoured.
She wakes with a gasp, her avatar wracked by unforgiving breaths. Tears blur her vision and she wipes at them uselessly.
The darkness in here is gentler. Her room is not breathing. There are no eyes swarming her. She is not suffocating.
Her room is kind, open, waiting.
His door has a red X across his face.
Pomni only glances at it as she passes.
It's still early. Nobody is awake yet. Everyone is still adjusting. Slowly, surely; it's almost normal.
Red and blue fingers twist at her sides as Pomni focuses on keeping her breath even.
He lifts his head, all of his eyes blinking slowly. They roll, not so frantic, and turn easily to her. The shadow cast by his tower of blankets and pillows douse him in a moment of calm; he blinks again, slowly.
Like he knows.
Is he still in there?
Does he know?
"Jax..." her voice threatens to break.
It blinks again, but remains still. The inky edges of its massive form jitter, but only slightly.
"I'm... I'm so..."
Her vision blurs again.
A beat. A step forward.
The beast shifts.
"Pomni?"
The little jester startles, rescinds that step back into the light to swing around and face a floating pair of dentures in a two-piece suit. "Caine!"
He's adjusting, too. Slowly. Surely. He floats closer, feet nearly touching the checkered ground. "Are you..." his gloved hands tighten around the middle of his staff clutched to his chest. He looks smaller than usual. Meek. He tips his jaw just a bit, soft eyes panning over her shoulder. "...all right?"
All wrong. Nothing is right. If Jax hadn't... If she hadn't let him-...
"Sorry. That's a ridiculous question, isn't it?"
Despite herself, Pomni manages a small laugh. She wipes at her eye before the fat tear there can roll over her pink cheek. "Ridiculous, but appreciated." After a moment, she turns toward the darkness again.
Jax has laid his head back down, form devoid of open, searching eyes. Comfortable enough in their presence to rest. It makes her heart quiver.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again, but can't find the right words.
Quiet footsteps pull her out of that spiral. When she turns to look at him, Caine has adorned the ground; on her level, at her side, he looks at Jax too.
"I'm so sorry," he says, barely above a whisper.
Pomni isn't sure if he's speaking to her or the abstraction sleeping in the dark.
"If there's anything I can do for you, Pomni..."
She swallows thickly. "Is there, um... any way to reverse... this?" When she gestures, a few of his eyes part long enough to gaze back at her.
The hesitation to respond tells her all she needs to know.
The world keeps turning. They adjust. They adapt. The circus shifts around them; it's still too-bright too-weird too-faraway from the world they knew — but now it's also softer at the edges, easier to digest. They have each other, and that alone is enough to keep Pomni from splitting apart.
Sometimes, the abyss sounds like a favor.
Would joining him fit the pieces back into place?
When she can't sleep, she wanders into his fort. She sits with him. He looks at her, watches her. More curious than anything; the darkness soothes him, and she likes to think that sitting with him even comforts him.
Some nights, he's sitting up awake. Waiting for her.
She stops sleeping in her room.
"Pom."
She gasps, jolts upright into the darkness. It's empty, infinite, stretches beyond the edges of the map - illuminated only by a phantom light, soft and glowing and purple-red.
Before her eyes adjust, there are thousands of ringed, colored pulsing pupils watching her.
When the world comes into focus, Jax is sitting in front of her instead. On his knees, hands folded over his lap. One of his ears bends too-far down, nearly obscuring part of his face in the shadow it casts.
"Jax!" She launches herself into his arms, tackling him backwards. He huffs as his back thuds against the darkness.
"Jeez," he half-laughs, half-sighs. She can barely hear him over the roaring of her heart; the tears smearing his overalls; the long, purple arms wrapped around her. "Miss me or something?"
"Yes!" Her voice breaks into a sob, barely coherent. "You idiot, of course I miss you."
His body relaxes. By just enough. She curls into him, body shaking with quiet sobs.
When he's still for too long, she pushes herself up to look down at him, to make sure he's really still here.
The light flickers.
He's staring straight up, chest rising and falling heavily beneath her hands. Tears run down the sides of his head, droplets disappearing into the floor of void beneath them.
In a weird way, she's glad he's crying too.
"I don't miss you," he says.
Her lips part.
He slides his small, square pupils onto her. "It's impossible to when you're with me all the time. It's kind of annoying, you know?"
"Idiot," she says again, scrubbing at her face as she sits back between his knees. He chases her slowly, rising to sit on one hand. The other drapes over her shoulder. "I'm not gonna let you be alone again."
His grin widens, and more tears roll over his teeth. "Why not? I can't abstract again."
She opens her mouth to speak-
"Pomni!"
Face hot, wet; chest heaving, body spilling into a haphazard series of glitching — Pomni comes to beneath the light of the circus and the worried stares of all her friends.
"Oh, my God, Pomni," Zooble says, voice shaking. "We thought we lost you."
A pounding ache claws at her head, so she puts a hand over her hat as she unsteadily sits up with a groan. "What happened?"
"You..." Zooble trails off, looks at everyone else crowding them.
Kinger blinks. Caine looks away. Gangle puts a ribbon over her mouth.
"We found you curled up with Jax," Ragatha says softly.
Caine snaps his fingers, and Pomni's form snaps back into place.
She places a soft, plush hand over the jester's shoulder. "He was just sleeping with you, but you..."
"You could have abstracted," Kinger interjects gently. "Or broken your code... There's no telling what prolonged contact could do."
Realization slams into her.
It wasn't just a dream.
"He's in there," Pomni breathes.