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There is no way to tell from the outside what's waiting inside, that they are all the same cheap wood grain and the same brass handle worn down at the thumb, and the only way through is through. She'd learnt that somewhere around the third one, or maybe the fourth — she'd stopped counting after a while and started moving on something more instinctive than not, as if there was some unnamed pulling thread that kept drawing her forward and forward and forward through room after room that shouldn't exist but did anyway, through all the memories that didn't belong to her, through the versions of Jax that weren't quite.
She doesn't let herself think too hard about what she's seen. Not yet. Later, maybe, she'll sit with it properly — the mother, the long cold months after, Ribbit's face when she'd finally looked at him like she understood something she hadn't before that he hadn't been able to stand, instead choosing to run.
She'll sit with all of it later. Right now time is of the essence, and she has the key to that locked door.
=====
The room is dark save for the lamp, though it seems hardly a room, but more of a mass of nothing but pure shadows. The lamp, though, doesn’t do much except illuminate a tiny space, but thank goodness it’s enough, because that’s how she finds him.
He’s got his hands hanging by his sides, back turned to her. If she didn’t notice the way he seemed stiff in his posture, she would’ve been fooled into thinking he hadn’t realised her presence at all.
“What,” he eventually says after letting the silence sit long enough to make a point.
“I uh— never knew you played the piano,” she offers, tentatively.
“I only knew two songs,” he says flatly. “What are you doing here?”
When she doesn’t reply quickly enough, he continues again. “You’ve seen everything, haven’t you? So why are you still here?”
She does know. She knows more about him now than she thinks he's ever let anyone know, more than she thinks he ever intended anyone to know, and it sits in her chest like something heavy and breakable that she's being very careful with.
She knows about the particular way shame calcifies when you carry it long enough and don't let anyone near it. She knows what he did and what came after and what he made of the aftermath, the way you build yourself into something untouchable and everything just breaks and you’ve got little ways of piecing it back.
She also knows better than to loudly proclaim that she can fix him, after what happened in the first door, because the truth is that no one can be fixed. They’re not tools, they’re mind scans of real people outside the Circus — but still inexplicably real.
“I’m not trying to make things difficult for you,” she promises. “I wanted to find you. We all wanted to find you.”
Though Gangle still hasn’t been able to feel much sadness despite her attempts after witnessing his abstracted form, Zooble hasn’t been very normal, and Ragatha’s still up to her shoulders in regret. Kinger seems to have seen this happen one too many times to feel much about anything anymore, or he wouldn’t have been sane even with his bucket.
“And now you have. So leave.”
“Jax,” she says. It’s the first time she’s said his name since seeing him for real this time.
“I don’t know why you keep insisting on coming back,” he continues on his tirade.“You’ve always made things incredibly hard for me, and I’ve told you time and time again that I have no need for you to be here. There’s nothing for you to fix, okay? Nothing. Whatever you followed me in here to do, it’s useless.”
She takes a step further towards him. “I know you don’t want me here. I know you’d rather I turn around and pretend this whole place doesn’t exist.” She forestalls his argument by speaking louder. “But I want to be here.” Another step.
“You’re so—” His derisive laugh sounds more empty than not. “You’re unbelievable. Every single time I think—” He stops himself. “You know what, it doesn’t matter. What matters right now is for you to turn back, even if you don’t want to.” He deflates. “ Look, you see me and you see everything I’ve done. I’m a horrible person. Nothing can change that. There’s no going back for me anymore. How do you stand this? Stand me? I—”
And then he stops, because he feels a pair of arms snake around him and hold on tight.
(He would’ve laughed at her, had the circumstances been different, laughed at how Pomni couldn’t even reach his middle.)
“Let go of me,” he says, but his voice has been all but reduced to a frayed whisper. He can’t wrap his head around it: since when has he become so weak to her?
“No,” she says simply. It’s hard to keep her voice even while fighting back tears.
“There’s nothing you can do for me.” He tries to pry her arms off, but they both know he isn’t trying very hard, considering how Pomni hardly budged. “Let go.”
“You can— you can talk to me. I'll be here to listen,” she offers. When she had made the decision to cross the room, there hadn’t been a moment of deliberation. There's just the space between them and then suddenly there isn't, and she gets her arms around him from behind and holds on — the way you hold something when you're frightened of losing it before you've even named why, because something tells her that if she doesn’t, this may very well be the last time she will see him again.
There’s a moment where Jax stills, then he turns to squeeze her tightly back.
“You know, I hate you,” he’s saying, voice muffled into her shoulder. “I really, really hate you.”
Despite that, Pomni can still feel a smile slowly creeping up her tear-stained face. She just stays where she is and lets him hold on and lets the moment be what it is — small and quiet and entirely at odds with everything that led up to it — and for just a second, standing in the dark with her arms around him and his around her, something in her chest unknots itself slightly.
Then she feels it.
Not all at once. It starts small — the way his grip on her tightens by a fraction, the way his breathing, which had just started to even out, hitches on an inhale and doesn't quite recover. She thinks at first that it's just the tail end of everything, the body catching up to itself, and she doesn't move. But then his next breath does the same thing, catches and stutters, and the one after that, and the one after that, as if he’s slowly losing the ground under him one inch at a time, and she becomes aware that he's muttering something.
Low. Almost inaudible. She wouldn't have caught it at all if she weren't this close.
Nothing changes. That's what he's saying. Over and over, slightly different each time, the words rearranging themselves around the same bleak centre, broken fragments of nothing changes, nothing changes, I'm still — it doesn't matter, it's the same, I'm still the same—
Nothing changes.
She goes very still and listens and feels the cold creep of understanding move through her.
He's not here anymore. Not entirely. He's somewhere inside his own head, somewhere she can't follow, and the words coming out of him are the sound of a person doing the thing people do when the ground has gone out from under them and they're trying to find something solid to stand on and can't, can't, can't find it anywhere..
“Hey—” she says, against his back. “Hey, I’ve got you. You’re fine.”
"You—" Barely above a whisper now. Wrecked. "You need to leave. You're making it — you're making this really hard—"
"I know," she begins. "I know I am. I'm staying anyway."
"Why." And it comes out small, it comes out like he actually doesn't know. "Why are you still—"
Pomni squeezes her eyes shut.
"Because if I leave now, I'm going to spend the rest of my life wondering if I shouldn't have."
The room goes quiet.
"I don't know if I'm helping."
Her voice shakes.
"I don't know if I'm making everything worse."
A breath.
"But I'm here, okay? I’ll be here.”
He doesn't say anything to that. Maybe he can't.
"I hate you," he repeats, even though he hasn’t once let go of her. It’s the only word he has left for something that doesn't have one, something that got in through all the cracks he'd spent years filling in that he doesn't have a name for and that is the most frightening part of all. "I hate you. I didn't— I didn't want you to see any of that. I didn't want anyone to ever— those were mine. That was mine. All of it." He takes in a shuddering breath. "And you just walked through all of it and you're still standing here and I don't know what to do with that. I don't know what to do with you. What am I supposed to do with myself?"
“Listen, stay with me here, okay? Look at me.” And when he does, she deliberately takes in a long breath and exhales again, which he begins to copy. They remain like this for a while, until he’s completely silent in her arms, still not talking but at least no longer trembling.
Thank goodness, she thinks. She would’ve breathed a sigh of relief but thinks better of it; she doesn’t want to spook him, especially when she’s just gotten him to calm down.
Then: “How long have I been here for?” asks Jax.
“Three days since your abstraction, give or take.” Pomni hasn’t thought about this ever since she threw herself headfirst into this pocket dimension-like space. “I’m not sure if any time has passed while I’ve been here, though.”
Jax has nothing to say to that. He just nods, and then he slumps over completely in her arms. Before her heart can go into overdrive at the sudden fainting spell, the lamp, which has been basking this place in a steady red halo, starts to flicker. For an instant, the shadow stretches like reaching fingers before dying out completely, shrouding them in pitch-black darkness.
“Jax?” she calls. “Jax!” She can feel him in her arms, the solid weight of him calming her somewhat and she holds him closer. But the problem remains that she can’t see anything. How’s she going to find the exit through the shadows that seem to be pressing insistently on her from all sides? The panic has barely set in when she feels herself, distantly, begin to lose consciousness.
=====
“—ni? Pomni?”
When Pomni opens her eyes, she immediately shuts them again. The glaringly bright white lights and colourful walls are certainly not doing her eyes any favours. She hears the others before she sees them — Ragatha's breath, sharp and small and involuntary, the exclamation too large to stay quiet. Zooble and Kinger’s sigh of relief. Gangle is still nowhere to be found, considering the absence of her sniffling.
As if a whole tidal wave has crashed right into her head, she sits up with a start, eyes wild. “Jax!” she gasps. “Where’s Jax?”
“I have never thought anyone could return from abstraction,” says Kinger with a tone of wonderment, a bucket still upturned resolutely on his head. “But Pomni, it seems that you’ve done it.”
Pomni scrambles over to Jax just as his fingers twitch and he opens his eyes. He doesn’t wince like Pomni did, just stares at the ceiling, so she covers his eyes with her hand so he wouldn’t blind himself too badly. Jax pulls her hand off him when he sits up from his position on the floor, blinking rapidly as if to come to terms with the fact that he has, indeed, returned.
“Are you— are you two okay?” Ragatha’s twiddling her thumbs. She seems rightfully worried. “Pomni, you— you nearly got pulled into abstraction too.”
Pomni looks herself over, as if only just realising her entire body seems to be glitching. It must be the adrenaline at work, because she doesn’t feel much pain at all. A quick look to a still dazed Jax has her slightly relieved — at least he isn’t glitching like she is.
“I’m fine! We’re fine,” she says back, entirely too upbeat for someone who just received the news that she nearly abstracted. “We just uh— we just need some time. I’ll be right back.” She stands up, dusting herself off, and leads a silent Jax back to his room.
None of them call after Jax; they give him space without being asked.
=====
His room is exactly the same.
She doesn't know why that surprises her. Four walls, the same rumpled bed, the same clutter arranged with a carelessness that is somehow still deliberate, as if the past three days had simply not happened, as if the room had just been sitting here waiting with the patience of something that doesn't know how to do anything else. She opens the door (to her surprise, it’s unlocked) and he walks in and stops in the middle of it.
She follows. Pulls the door shut behind her.
He stands there.
She doesn't crowd him. She stays near the door for a moment and just — watches, quietly, the way you watch something you're still making sure is real. He's here. He's standing in the middle of his room with the slightly vacant quality of someone who has arrived somewhere and is waiting for it to make sense, taking it in pieces — the walls, the bed, the clutter — like he's doing an inventory check of a place he'd half-convinced himself he'd never see again.
She finds the edge of the bed and sits on it and doesn't say anything.
She has learned, slowly and imperfectly, that there are silences you fill and silences you leave alone, and this one has the particular quality of something that needs air. So she gives it air. She sits with her hands in her lap and the lamp throwing its warm circle across the floor and lets the room be quiet.
She watches him stand there for a long time, hands loose at his sides, just staring at everything around him. She can't see his face from here, only his back, the line of his shoulders. She's looked at her own room so many times and it has never meant much beyond being the thing that's always there. She wonders if it looks different to him right now. She wonders if everything does.
Then he turns away and heads for the wall, sliding down it until he's sitting on the floor with his back against the plaster, knees drawn up. She says nothing about it and slides off the edge of the bed and sits on the floor too, back against the bed frame, a few feet from him.
Neither of them acknowledges it.
She looks down at her hands. The glitching at her seams has quieted somewhat since they came back through, but there's still a faint static running up her left arm that comes and goes, a low persistent thing she's been mostly ignoring to certain success. She flexes her fingers and watches the light stutter faintly across her knuckles
She'll feel it later. There's a lot she's going to feel later.
Right now there is just the floor, and the lamp, and Jax a few feet away not saying anything, and the thing she's been carrying since before any of this started that she should probably say while the quiet is still the right kind.
She picks at the hem of her sleeve. There’s something she’s got to say before she loses the chance to. After today, she doesn’t think he would allow her to talk about it again.
"The other day," she starts, her voice small. "When you came over to me. You were going to say something."
She feels him listening even though he doesn't move.
"And then you didn't. And you walked away and I just— " She looks at the floor. "I let you. I told myself it was nothing, that it was fine, that it was just you being you, but I knew it wasn't and I didn't call you back anyway." She pauses. "I'm sorry. I should have."
The silence stretches.
It goes on long enough that she starts to wonder if she's read it wrong, if it's landed somewhere it shouldn't, if now isn't the time and there isn't a time and she should've just let it be.
"It's fine," he says eventually.
She shakes her head. "It's not."
"Pomni."
"I know you're not going to make a thing of it. I'm not asking you to." She looks up at him. "I just needed to say it."
He looks back at her. His expression is doing something she can't quite pin down — not closed off, just present and unreadable in the way that she has come to understand means he is sitting with something and hasn't yet decided what to do with it. Then he looks away, and the room settles.
She doesn't know how long they sit like that; it could have been hours for all she knew — time passes strangely in the Circus.
She thinks she should probably move to the couch.
He hasn't slept. She doesn't know if he can sleep, after everything, but he should try, and she's sitting here taking up space in a room that is his, and the couch is right there across the room and it's a perfectly reasonable place to be. She’s not about to leave Jax to it, especially when he’d just returned from abstraction with wild thoughts no doubt still swirling in his mind. Perhaps she’d ask Kinger about the science of the reversal of abstraction later, but right now she has to be here.
She starts to stand and is halfway up with one hand pressed against the bed frame, when his hand closes around hers.
He's not looking at her. He's looking straight ahead at the wall across from him, and his grip is light — barely there, just his fingers around her hand — and he doesn't say anything for a moment. She looks down at where he's holding on and then at the side of his face and waits.
"Doesn't it hurt?" she asks, quietly. The glitching, she means — she's still running warm with it, a low static under her skin, and she knows what it does when something makes contact with it.
He knows what she means. She can tell by the slight pause, the way his jaw shifts.
It does hurt. Frankly, that is partly the reason he hasn't let go — the faint sting of it, small and persistent and real, the proof of something that he can't quite bring himself to give up yet. The pain is the only thing that tells him that this… isn’t a dream. That this is not the dark room without a way out. That this is not the place with the lamp. That he is here, in his room, in his actual room, and she is here too and that is a real thing that is happening. He's been away for three days and the ground still doesn't feel entirely solid under him. The sting helps by doing something that nothing else quite is.
He shakes his head — a no.
She watches him do it and doesn't push.
"I'm going to go to the couch," she says, gesturing. "I'll just be over there, okay? You should—"
"Stay," he says.
It comes out rough and quiet, the first word he's said in a while, and he still isn't looking at her.
"I am," she says. "I said I'll be on the couch, I'm not going anywhere—"
His hand tightens, slightly. Not much. Just enough.
"Stay here," he says. And then, quieter still, almost as an afterthought, as if the sentence has to be walked back before it asks too much: "With me." A beat. "That is to say — if you don't mind. It's fine if you don't."
It comes out with the careful offhandedness of someone who has spent a very long time not asking for things and is doing it anyway and would very much like to be able to take it back if it goes wrong.
She looks at him. At the side of his face in the dim light, the set of his jaw, the way he is resolutely not looking at her. At the hand around hers that is asking in the only way he knows how. There’s no real way of knowing whether he’d push her away again the day after, but she hopes that at least the events of today has gotten through to him somewhat, that at the end of it all he will always have someone to talk to even if he subconsciously closes himself off from everyone else.
“Okay,” is what she says instead.
=====
“...What would you do if I abstracted tomorrow?”
“...I'd move on. And probably forget about you.”
I couldn’t forget them, try as I did.
But I would have tried with you, too.
=====
“Oh, here we go. Here we go! Because I didn't fight back, that means I secretly care about you?! I'm just a misunderstood little chicken fetus in an egg that needs to be cracked open. Well, I am NOT! I do not care about you, or ANYONE ELSE in this circus in the slightest! End of story! You are my playthings, and I get joy out of making you SUFFER. I'm the one who causes pain for FUN! If I led you on, it was just to make this part hurt you more.”
Maybe that’s the worst part, for me to have wanted you to believe it, that there’s nothing for you to fix, that there never was any hidden spark for you to uncover.
But you just had to keep trying anyway.
I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry you couldn’t find what you were looking for.
end.