Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nothing she will do can stop the shaking.

Pomni’s tried. Oh, she’s tried, but ever since she escaped the digital circus her hands haven’t stopped trembling.

‘Escaped’ is sort of generous, to be honest. It wasn’t like you see in movies with a climactic final battle or an ultimate sacrifice or a huge plot twist; this is real life and things don’t work like that. The cause of their release was simply due to the servers shutting down. Age, probably. They woke up at desks scattered around the C&A building, pushed off headsets and found each other. Through fleeting sightings through hallways and SOS calls. They left and breathed in the air untainted with a digital edge and felt real concrete with their five-fingered hands again.

They broke through the barrier and pushed open the exit door to see real, golden light streaming in. The real exit, not a fake created as a tease or an oblivious AI’s genuine attempt at release. This one had an ‘other side’ and it was glorious.

Or at least, that’s how Pomni wanted to see it.

In reality there was no fanfare, no confetti, no triumphant sunlight beaming onto their faces. Just six unsteady people barging in on a world they forgot they were apart of. Into a cloudy day with traffic lights and people walking past, all with purpose, so fast they all blurred into one dark, staring face with a hundred different eyes.

They had hastily made their way across a few streets and sat down on benches and other things that weren’t meant to be chairs. It was all adrenaline saturated, all stress induced movement. Anxious movement that would only cease when they were at rest. Which would be never. They weren’t nearly far enough away from C&A for comfort but some of them needed to sit, some needed to think, some just needed to talk. The river of people wearing black and looking

They, hauntingly, look far more like their avatars than Pomni cares to admit. It was almost surreal at first. These people she’s known for three years suddenly have new faces and new (old?) names and there’s nothing they can do to make it feel more normal. Because, at least in her experience, her face doesn’t feel like hers and her name no longer turns her head.

As odd and uncanny as it was in the digital circus she had gotten used to elastic white skin and candy eyes. She had become accustomed to the gloves that wouldn’t come off, the simplistic shapes and surreal, uniform textures. Even the clipping through objects and falling through the maps, though, that one was an acquired taste. It wasn’t home, but it was the next best thing.

Little things about them were plucked from the real world and seemingly uploaded to their avatars. Kinger was wearing a purple jacket; Gangle, a red scarf almost as long as she was tall; Zooble had a maximalist, multicoloured style for their outfit, lots of chunky jewellery and coloured makeup; Ragatha had reddish-pink hair and Jax had purple. And Pomni looked something like she did in the circus, too, same brown hair and big eyes. The first time she looked in the mirror it was a fright.

Tired blue eyes stared back at her, dark smudge-y bags weighing them down and her skin is pale but not white like she’s used to, faint freckles dapple her cheeks instead of perfectly oblong pink blush. Her hair is a chocolate brown, straight cut bangs across her head with two loose strands also blunt cut next to her face and the rest of her hair is pulled back in a low bun that rests against her neck. She was wearing a blue, red and yellow patchwork sweater with a yellow collared shirt underneath. It was sickeningly close to what she looked like in the circus but whoever Pomni was didn’t fit into this body anymore. Despite being in it the whole time she’s shrunk inside, rattling around in there, having to stand on her tiptoes to see out of her eyes.

None of them looked quite like they were comfortable either, be it their digital avatars leaving more of an impression on them than expected or just how someone’s appearance changes over three years with no maintenance. Shock was the mode reaction, that or morbid curiosity. Needless to say, it was scary how much that place had changed them.

It was almost funny at how close they actually were to their real bodies but had no clue. Their true identities were right under their noses and they didn’t even know it, little pieces of themselves stolen away and tainted. Like it was a sick joke, remnants of their time in the digital circus splattered all over them like black ink that wouldn’t fade. Clear as day, it was written all over their faces. Pomni almost wishes that those three years were just simulated and they’d wake up the same day as they went under, able to laugh it off and have the terrifying memories fade. Even if it would have felt like forever. If it could have just been one day, one week, it would have been easier.

That wasn’t gonna happen, though. It was real and definitely three years later.

Their phones still worked but were all dead, unsurprisingly, except for Gangle’s whose headset cracked it when she dropped her phone and fell. When she tried to turn it on it didn’t work. They had all been left essentially homeless. Pomni’s landlord, after hearing no word from her, just moved her stuff out and sold her place to someone else. To be honest, she can’t really blame them, she might’ve done the same, that is, if she didn’t know the circumstances.

They had gone to an internet cafe a couple blocks away to charge all of their phones and reconnect with reality. After that it was back to the benches and the other things, yoga ball sized bits of concrete to stop cars driving over pedestrianised land. Back again despite Kinger’s phone taking another full three years to charge. Pomni was going to call someone at those benches, it was probably the right thing to do in her situation. She would’ve if her shaking didn’t detour her. That and she had a bit of decision paralysis. Who was she going to call? Were they going to ask her questions she couldn’t answer?

Would they even pick up?

And the scariest of all, the thing that fuelled the fire: What would she say when asked that first dreaded question that cinched her throat: Where she had been? Or worse, the second, ‘why?’ She didn’t have an answer but her mulling over the whole thing whilst staring at the bright screen was abruptly interrupted by someone’s ringtone.

Pomni snapped her head up as Gangle jumped a bit. It was Jax’s phone, him instead blinking tiredly as if it took him a second to register it. Everybody’s heads turned, awoken from their foggy rumination. He pulled it out and stared blankly at the screen for a few seconds before glancing around and then picking up. They only heard one side of the conversation but they could tell the person on the other end was angry. Pomni thought she imagined it, Jax shrinking a tiny bit in his seat in a way he never had before.

“Hello?” He said in an attempt to sound as confident as usual but his voice was raspy and hollow. If Pomni spoke right now she’d guess she sounded much the same. For a few seconds there was silence and then he frowned. “No, I—“

Silence from him again. The lack of his usually square pupils was a little strange but still they darted around when he realised all eyes were on him. “U-Uh, yeah, sorry. I’ve been—“ He sighed, “…Busy.” At that she knew that was his attempt at the first suffocating question. ‘Where have you been?’

“Yes, for three years.” More quiet, piercing stares looking in. “No reason.” That second question. ‘Why?’

Jax groaned after a second, fingers looping around the strands of hair at the back of his neck and tugging gently. Pomni had seen a few times before during their time in the circus, in particularly stressful situations, Jax would palm and rub the back of his neck almost habitually. Maybe that was what he was trying to do. “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

Another minute or so of the five others listening in and Jax kept his frown up, a defeated look on his face before he shook it off. “Fine. Bye.”

Pressing stares caused him to sigh again, a car rushing by and startling them all, the onlookers that flowed past them were a stark reminder that they were no longer alone in this world. “Welp, I’ve apparently been homeless for three years.” He had said with a nonchalant shrug. “What do we do now?”

The question seemed to cut through the confused fog clouding their minds and judgements but even so, nobody seemed to have much of an answer. It was the question they were all thinking but one nobody wanted to have to answer. Seemingly at once though, everyone began to check on their housing situation, following a lead that Jax had accidentally created.

After finding out they were all in much the same situation, Kinger spoke up as the only one to actually have something to fall back on. He still had a house, paid off, even had an old car, but it wasn’t at C&A or anywhere close. After a quick Google Maps adventure they found that it was a medium train journey away and, with nowhere else to go, they decided to all head there together. Kinger was happy to bring them all with him, stating how it might’ve been too lonely if not.

The train station wasn’t too far away. They had to use a lot more Google Maps since everyone had forgotten all of the routes around the city. The area looked underwhelming. Just normal. None of the young, colourful visuals or bizarre imagery they were used to, just mature brick and mortar, concrete and grey. Too much grey. As for the station itself, it was crowded and noisy.

They made it a point to stay out of the way of the other people there. They passed almost like ghosts or the NPC peg dolls they’d kept seeing around. They wouldn’t go near, wouldn’t interact or ask for help. Their environment was enough, not quite ready to touch base with the rest of humanity yet. Almost as if Pomni and the others were still there, still trapped, just given a taster of what they’d lost.

Luckily, money wasn’t something that expired, so buying six tickets wasn’t a problem despite half of them not having much in their wallets. Pomni was one of those few but Ragatha smiled and told them not to worry; she’d cover it since Kinger was letting them go to his house; she certainly wouldn’t have struggled to.

After that, the time waiting for the train seemed to stretch on and on, trains thundering by, not meant for them. They sounded like race cars on a track as stray leaves got swept up by the wind, strung along by the train, chasing it. Pomni spent that time just trying to stop shaking, though she noticed how Jax stepped away from the rest of them to make another phone call. Having no idea he even could, she overheard him speaking some pretty distressed Spanish to whoever he was calling.

Her mind was taken off it rather quickly by Ragatha tapping her shoulder.

“Hey,” she near-whispered, hand still on her shoulder. “You okay? You’re, uh, shaking quite a bit.”

And it was true but she couldn’t do anything about it. She was stuck like this until it finally sunk in that she was home and she didn’t have to worry about insanity or abstraction or keeping everybody sane anymore. But, then again, her home had been sold to another person three years ago. She had no home anymore. If she had anything it was these random five people.

“Y-Yeah,” Pomni rasped, taking note of how unsure she sounded and trying to correct it. “I’m fine, just a little jittery.”

Rags nodded. “Me too, hah.”

“Is Jax okay?” Pomni asked hesitantly.

She isn’t sure why she asked like Ragatha would know. The woman looked back at him standing just outside the shelter of the station and frowned. She’s also unsure of why she even thought of it. Pomni’s never really said anything about his well-being before, but now felt like the right time. Ever since they got back (which by then was a good hour) he’s seemed… distant? Just weird.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Ragatha frowned. “I mean, he doesn’t look too happy but I feel like we’re all a little frazzled right now.” She laughed but it was humorless, weak and hesitant. Just like Pomni’s.

The latter nods, sighing and looking back at her hands. There’s a looming anxiety coiled tightly in her chest, an inability to take a full breath. It curls around her bones, in between her fingers and around her neck and squeezes. It’s a steadily rising feeling of dread that, in this place that doesn’t know her anymore, it won’t be kind. Like coming back to the nest, a baby bird, smelling different than before. A smell that the mother doesn’t like.

Life, real life, is hard. She’s well aware of that and she knows deep in her soul that if you aren’t prepared for things going awry you’ll get squished like a defenceless bug. Things like keeping a house or taking care of yourself or even phone battery are unforgiving and cruel, especially when you’re stranded with no way back. And she couldn’t feel any less prepared, sitting here at this train station with her five companions. Trembling. It’s a pathetic sight, she’s sure.

These things that she had carefully constructed long ago were falling down around her, big pieces of her life into tumbling debris toppling like a game of Jenga. Crushing her in the rubble. She’ll be smothered and suffocated by these skyscraper Tetris blocks falling down all around her, forming a tower impossible to climb and sealing the lid. All the while other people in the world could knock them over like dominoes. It’s so unfair. And she’s only getting started.

But she’s getting ahead of herself. By the time she’d even started that train of thought, the real one had arrived.

And here she is now. Still shaking, still trying to hold all her pieces together.

In a way, she reminds herself of who she was on the first day, that terrible first day when Kaufmo abstracted and she’d left Ragatha for dead. Where her former life fell apart piece by piece. Where she couldn’t remember her own name.

That spiralling pit of dread that’d faded into the background as the months went by. It’s back. It’s here all over again. It’s a new ‘first day,’ another fresh start that really feels stale and empty; she’s done this all before just instead with colourful characters and adventures and a bright circus with a digital edge.

She’s done it but there’s no theme song, grey-green terrain rushing by being blurred by the window, the sound of people shifting and the train wheels underneath her thunking over the tracks. That’s all there is now, the once bright scenery turning so monochrome giving her whiplash.

She barely remembers getting on the train. It’s all still a blur, all of the people and places and stops blending together like muddy tracks would smear across concrete. Everything melds together and she can’t look up at the faces because their millions of eyes look back. They glow and pulse colours at her and she doesn’t want to see those eyes look back again with a frantic desire for escape. Stares cut into her like throwing knives. She’s at one of those table places with four seats around, hands rested against it. Shaking. Pulsing. Staring.

Every single person she’s watched lose their minds have turned into those monsters, those nightmarish creatures desperate and clawing for escape, enough so that they’d happily corrupt and kill anybody that stood in their way. No matter who they used to be, those people are gone now, reduced to an inky rabid mess of neon piercing eyes and glitching black. They didn’t haunt her dreams then; she had no need to sleep. But now there’s no escape anymore.

She remembers the out of bounds when she clipped out of the map the first time. With Gummigoo. A dark labyrinth of a status chamber, unused assets and clipping models and extra backups lying there waiting for their turn to be loved, their chance to be brought to life. She had gotten attached too quickly, never made that mistake again. She’s different now.

“Pomni?”

She blinks up at the noise and it’s Gangle, frowning at her. She had expected herself to jump at the slightest of sounds like she’s been doing all day but for some reason she’d expected this.

“Yeah?” She replies almost in slow-motion, blinking wearily again.

“You okay?” Gangle asks, fidgeting with the tassels on her red scarf.

“I’m okay.” Pomni sighs lightly through her nose. “Are you okay?”

Gangle nods and when she does Pomni diverts her attention. If this is going to be just like before, just like the first time in the circus, she’s going to do it right this time. She knows now that even if you feel trapped or out of place in a world you don’t feel you belong in, that you will find yourself a corner to call your own.

Be it a single room just for you or a house with all of your friends. She knows it’s going to be hard but that it’s possible; she’s done it all before. She isn’t going to panic, she isn’t going to be trapped, she isn’t hopeless. And if she can do it in the circus, in a place where insanity meant death, then she can do it in the real world too. Out here has a place for her, she just has to find it.

Pomni scans around again, looking at all of her friends. The two four-seater tables either side of the aisle are taken up all by them on the fairly empty train. In the seats next to her are Gangle, Ragatha, and Kinger. Across the aisle are Jax and Zooble sitting across from each other in the window seats, talking in hushed voices. Her eyes settle on those two for a bit and she gives them once overs.

Zooble’s wearing a yellow collared shirt under a red jacket with a sticker pattern all over it, some chunky earrings and medium length rose-red hair. They had on yellow combat boots and dark blue shorts. Jewellery decorated their colourful outfit, a choker-necklace combo here, an arm of bracelets there, patterned fingerless gloves are the only things on their hands but Pomni doesn’t doubt they’d wear a ton of rings otherwise.

Jax is a little different, twice dyed hair is pulled partly back behind his head into a small ponytail, different shades of purple painted across his head. His dark roots are showing too along with what seemed to be the colour it was dyed previously, a light teal. He has on a two-toned red hoodie with yellow cuffs and strings.

Under the zip is a white shirt with three purple stars over the chest. He has on black jeans and white sneakers. Scattered across his light brown skin are tiny white scars, some littered around randomly, some crossed through each other and some scratched neatly in a line. It’s a normal thing to have. Scars are a part of someone’s humanity but it’s the fact that they’re everywhere that gives Pomni a bad feeling.

The former jester turns her head to the woman across from her and Ragatha comes into view doing something on her phone. Red curls similar to Zooble’s colour hang down from her head like streamers on bicycle handles, blue eyes look down at her phone.

She’s wearing a purple cardigan over a white shirt and some dark purple pants that Pomni saw earlier. A white bow is fastened at the back of her head, too. It perplexes Pomni as to why most of them (keyword: most. Jax, Zooble.) were dressed so… business casual. Her memory is still a little fuzzy but she hardly remembers wearing dress shirts and slacks much.

Glancing next to her, there’s Gangle. She’s an albino, it seems, almost white hair and skin with ice-blue eyes. Her red scarf is wrapped loosely around her, almost covering half of her face as she slumps in her seat, eyes drooping closed. She has on a grey jacket, a white skirt and black leggings with brown boots that halo around her ankles, too thin to properly fit into them.

Next to Ragatha, Kinger sits preoccupied with staring at his own arms. Rags and Pomni were the most humanoid of the bunch which makes it strange to see the others (but especially Kinger, for some reason) as actual people. He has ashy brunette hair, some facial hair and bags under his eyes, that purple jacket over another dress shirt and some black pants and brogues.

His eyes hardly have any colour but Pomni hazards a guess of green. Honestly, he looks about as she expected. If somebody told her to imagine what Kinger looked like as a human she’d probably come up with something similar.

All things considered the train ride went by relatively quick, though it did leave some cause for concern. They’d gotten this far, sure, but she guesses she wouldn’t be wrong to assume they didn’t really remember how to function in the real world.

Things looked different, newer. Flatter and more streamlined, Pomni was suddenly transported from her bright, charming city to an unrecognisable husk of what it was. The train station’s ticket machines were one example. They all only used contactless now.

She had stepped onto the platform, minded the gap and looked around like she had never seen one before. All things were an unfamiliar novelty, them wandering around the train station looking for the exit.

The longer that they searched the more that same claustrophobic feeling tightened its grip around her throat. The place wasn’t meant to make her feel like that. Just by design, the station was supposed to feel open, glass panes for the ceiling, streaming in natural light. A light and airy floor plan, cozy but impersonal brick accents. And brick pillars intercepting the open space every so often to show a time board for all the trains. It didn’t take long; it wasn’t that big, but it seemed to unsettle her anyway, despite preventative measures.

The group managed to avoid asking someone for help when Gangle spotted an exit sign and they’d all walked far quicker than everyone else heading that direction. Fresh air is liberating, a weight lifted from her shoulders again, but there’s a cold reality that more of this push and pull, this entrapment and escape, is probably to come. Or at least, situations that feel like it. Regardless, the knowledge still makes itself comfortable in her brain.

They leave the train station and began to follow their new best friend Google Maps to Kinger’s house. They somehow come out into an even bigger city than the one they’d left. Tall skyscrapers looked over them, casting strange shadows and obscuring the sky. Noisy construction sites drilled and seemed to serve no purpose at all. Unfinished sandboxes, boundless heaps of bugs and work-in-progresses.

The former chess piece had assured them that it wasn’t that far away far more times than they’d asked. And again the stares brand hot marks of shame into the backs of their heads. Pomni shrinks under their many piercing eyes, varying in temperature, verging on hostile, even if they aren’t looking at her.

She could see they felt it too; Ragatha buttoned up her cardigan higher; Gangle fussed with the tassels on her scarf; Jax pulled his hood up, pulled his sleeves down.

It’s uncomfortably real, not as rehearsed or as planned or as disgustingly predictable as the circus. Granted, the lack of clipping environments or unsettlingly blank-faced peg doll NPCs is a welcomed change.

The real world is whiplash, it’s bright lights and too many people and screaming in her ears. It’s cars tearing around corners and streetlights turning on and cold biting at her fingertips. It’s the quiet street they eventually turn in to. It’s the dark col-de-sac where Kinger’s house sleeps, laid to rest at the absence of it’s owner.

As they sky blends navy blue with red-grey clouds swimming on the horizon line they make their way mechanically down the sidewalk. Pomni isn’t sure when the city turned into the street but it hardly seems to matter; everything here seems to look the same.

Kinger stops in front of a path lined with weeds and looks down to his old home. He sort of stares, freezes. It seems that everybody follows his gaze.

A matted tangle of tall grass clumps the whole front garden in one green dreadlock. A worn stone path leads up to the porch and meshes with the driveway where an old car is parked. Pomni doesn’t know what kind but she would guess it was from a good few years ago; it was nothing like she’d seen on the roads today. Caked on the windshield and spattered across the rest of the car is a good nine-hundred layers of white and grey presents from the local pigeons along with whatever dirt and mud got trapped in between.

Some of the shingles on the roof had fallen off at some point, reddish-brown bricks exposed behind chipping, off-white paint. Ivy crawls over the sides and even obscures some of the windows, a big tree with twisting roots looms close to the low fence, branches hanging down far enough to hit you in the face.

The garage door looks almost rusted closed and next to it is a window with the curtains drawn, glass stained with years of dirt and rain. They seemed to have seen everything. Storms, heatwaves, quiet snow where all you could hear was your own breathing. The awning over the front door is teaming with spiderwebs, the doormat on the stone porch still croaking out a dusty ‘welcome.’

Without wasting another second, Kinger steps forward and approaches the porch as if he’d never been there in his life. He rummages in his pockets for a few seconds before pulling out a set of keys.

Slowly, he pushes the clutter of letters through the letterbox and brings the key up to the keyhole. The door clicks unlocked and everybody follows behind, cautious not to step wrong. Jax has to duck to avoid getting webs stuck in his hair.

The door groans open to reveal a simple interior with a blanket of dust draped over it. It’s your classic family home only left dormant, on standby, waiting for its inhabitants to come back. The group swerves around the pile of mail Kinger pushed through the letter box. Late bills, junk mail, the works. Whoever was last to enter shut the door behind them.

Silence mists around them and as Pomni looks up at Kinger a certain nostalgia fills his eyes. Normally he wouldn’t be able to stop jittering, darting and zipping around this new environment, but now he’s completely still. Quiet. Because this place isn’t new. A certain sadness clouds his gaze but he shakes it off and turns towards them all again.

“Well,” Kinger begins, crosses his arms and rocks back on his heels, “It’s a bit of a fixer-upper.” Suddenly, a spider drops down from its web next to him and his attention is immediately diverted. He stares at it. “What should we do now?”

“Um, Kinger?” Ragatha asks slowly.

The man turns back in their direction. “Oh, hello.”

“You were talking to us… before the spider?” Zooble adds.

“Ah yes,” Kinger nods. “Well then. What should we do?”

The question hangs in the air and makes it thicker than before, harder to breathe. With all of their ties to this world severed they had little direction to follow. People in their adult lives typically had more structure than them but with nothing to do and hardly anywhere to go, nobody really wants to answer that question and it shows. Another few beats of silence fill this empty room.

“We could try to… clean up a bit?” Ragatha suggests tentatively. “I-I mean, not that your house is dirty, just—“

“No, it is,” Kinger nods, “I know. That’s what three years left alone will do, though.”

“Alright then,” Rags nods, more confident as she takes charge. “First order of business: probably get the water and electric bills taken care of, actually. Second: cleaning, I think.”

Murmurs of agreement echo around and Ragatha lets a faint smile onto her face. “Alright then! Let’s do that. I’ll go see what kind of tools we have to work with.”

Zoned out, Pomni snaps back to the present when her name is spoken. “Pomni, why don’t you come with me and we’ll find some cleaning stuff?” Ragatha asks, kind eyes flashing her way.

She nods, a little frazzled. “Uh, y-yeah, sure.”

Ragatha leads her with a confident stride to the kitchen, allowing Pomni in first and pushing the door closed, leaving a little sliver of the outside still visible.

“How are you faring? Okay?” Rags asks, thinking for a moment before seemingly adjusting her expectations. “Terrible?”

“Yeah, terrible seems fitting,” Pomni begins, fiddling with a loose thread inside her sleeve. “Honestly, it’s almost reminding me of…”

Ragatha raises an eyebrow once made of thread. “Of?”

“My first day.” Pomni sighs. “I-I don’t want that to be what it feels like but yeah, that’s just what it is, I guess.”

Ragatha’s expression mushes into one of sympathy, one that makes the former jester’s heart twist in an awkward direction. It’s not that it isn’t appreciated but something about it shoots her backwards in time through a swirl of horrible nostalgia and déjà vu. It sends her back three years to before she was seasoned in the digital world and she was just a scared twenty-something looking for an exit. And that beacon of light shone down on her, funnelled through Ragatha, hitting her like dappled sunlight.

And she had abandoned her to die by the hands of an abstracted Kaufmo. And even though she hadn’t the guilt had torn her up inside until she apologised and, for some reason, Ragatha forgave her. She hadn’t even hesitated.

And now she’s here, stuck in a different place but the same situation, stuck somewhere she doesn’t recognise, uprooted and confused. Like as soon as she had gotten to grips with it all somebody had come along to rip her out of the soil again, planting her into a completely different place where the world is wrong again. The room seems to spin.

“I… think I get it,” Ragatha begins, looking into her eyes with as reassuring of a look as she can probably muster.

Pomni swallows the rising nausea in her throat. She nods. Ragatha then places a hand on her shoulder.

And it’s real.

It carries warmth, skin, flesh, bone. It isn’t fabric, it isn’t simulated. It has weight and depth and meaning, things that couldn’t come across right back there. It’s a grounding force, one that roots her to the earth, one that brings her back.

Ragatha smiles softly. “It’s everyone’s first day now.”

With a final squeeze, Ragatha doesn’t let go but changes the subject. “How about for now we look for some cleaning equipment in here, bring it back out and make sure Jax hasn’t started causing problems yet, alright?”

Pomni takes a deep breath, steadying her grasp on the revolving world around her. “Yeah. Just one step at a time, huh.”

“Exactly,” Rags smiles, letting go. “Now, let’s see when we have in here…” she says, turning her focus towards the multitude of kitchen cabinets.

After looking for a minute or two they find a broom, dustpan and brush, some nonspecific surface cleaner and a duster. And paper towels. There isn’t a lot of anything in most of the cupboards except expired food and random under-the-sink items. There are definitely too many cobwebs though. Luckily, they had found the duster first so Pomni had been using that to avoid touching the invisible web.

She feels like a mouse, her hands scuttling around the darkest corners, intrigued by packets and bottles bigger than her and intimidated by rat poison and fly swats. Just searching for scraps through a simple life.

Oh, to be a mouse. Fluffy and soft and unburdened by the responsibility of being a human who has to pay taxes and feed themself. But she isn’t a mouse and she’s looking for cleaning equipment. Harsh realities.

After a thorough investigation in the last bottom cupboard, Pomni pulls herself out of the cabinet and glances over to Ragatha who is on her knees, rummaging around in the other end of the cabinets, past the oven and next to the fridge. The brunette stands and sets down the unopened packs of small sponges and cloths she’d found, stretching and glancing over to the window.

The rain spatters against the glass, grime and dirt from whenever it rained last being blotted away. The skies had looked dangerously grey earlier. Ragatha stands up and meets Pomni’s eye. “Find anything?”

“Yeah,” Pomni holds up her findings. “Just these. I think we’ve looked everywhere else.”

Rags nods. “Great. Let’s go back outside then. Maybe Kinger has figured out what to do about the bills and stuff.” Pomni nods, gathers up her things and follows Ragatha out of the kitchen.

Trailing after her like she’s in a game of follow the leader, the two exit and find a very quiet living room with Kinger on a hushed phone call in the corner.  Zooble is on their phone next to Gangle who is having her scarf secretly tied in knots courtesy of Jax who is sitting in between them on the couch.

Once Kinger hangs up the phone and sighs, he looks around a little. “Okay. I spoke to my brother and—“

“Your brother?” Jax halts his knot tying (which he probably thinks is more discrete than it is) and leans over to look at Kinger. “Shouldn’t you call, like, the utility company or something?”

“Do you not know who sends your utility bill, Jax?” Zooble asks, not looking up from their phone.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t paid bills in three years.” Jax rolls his eyes.

“Anyway,” Kinger interjects, trying to wrangle the conversation back on topic. “I talked to him and luckily, w-when Queenie and I went missing he called to pause all services from them, so we don’t have a mountain of bills and late fees and stuff.”

“That’s good!” Ragatha smiles. “We found some cleaning stuff as well so we can get started on bringing this space back to life.”

“Huh…” Gangle speaks suddenly, making Zooble jump. “We really did all go missing , didn’t we?”

After she speaks there’s a piercing silence, as if the realisation could cut them like a knife but they’re sitting too still to be hurt. Pomni’s hands shake. They have been this whole time, jittering about like they have too much energy in them, like a can of soda that was shaken about and ready to explode. If there really were knives in the air then her hands would be sliced all over.

Gangle’s vacant eyes stare holes through the floorboards, reaching behind her to fiddle with the tassels on her scarf before her face blinks back to normal, yelping when she discovers the knots. “My scarf!”

Jax seems to shake himself back next, chuckling slyly. “Like it?”

“No!” Gangle deflates slightly. “Stop doing things to my scarf…”

“Mean,” Zooble juts in, going in to elbow Jax lightly. But he dodges it a little too quickly, jerking his shoulder backwards a small amount, his face flickering through a strange, unreadable emotion before reverting back to his usual grin.

“You sat there and watched it happen,” the former rabbit says, shrugging with only his shoulders, eyes narrowing challengingly. “You’re an accessory to scarf knots, Zoobs.”

“I was on my phone, asshole.” Zooble sighs. “Ugh, it feels good to swear.”

“I know right?” Jax sighs contentedly, looking satisfied and lying back against the cushions, stretching both arms out to his sides and resting them on the top of the couch.

Ragatha sighs. “It’s only been, what, three hours? You seriously can’t go three hours without causing problems?”

Jax smiles. “It’s my brand. You should know this by now.”

“You are such a toddler,” Ragatha says, clearly choosing to move on from this by the way she closes her eyes and breathes in aggressively. Pomni thinks she wants to join in with the conversation but can’t seem to find anything to say.

“I think I-I have a vague to-do list,” Kinger says, trying to regain control of the conversation which has long since gone off the rails. “We’re not gonna have free, instant digital feasts anymore, so we’re gonna need some food cause… I-I mean, there’s no way any of the food in this house is edible. So, somebody is gonna have to go to the grocery store. While they do that I’ll try and get the water and electricity back on. A-And while I do that, somebody else can help clean ‘n stuff.”

Ragatha smiles. “Sounds like a plan!” She clasps her hands together with a small clap. “So, who will be doing what? Let’s divvy up these tasks.”

“Uhh,” Zooble pipes up, looking into their wallet with a dissatisfied expression. “We might have a problem.”

Rags frowns. “What?”

Zooble plucks a card from its place and holds it out, front side facing the rest of them. The picture looks outdated, brown hair pulled into a low ponytail, a dark knit sweater with neon green stripes and a pale face with thick eyeliner stares back at them. They all subconsciously move a little closer to see.

Zooble grimaces. “My drivers licence is expired.”

The statement is met with silence, everybody else quietly extracting their licences to check. Pomni finds herself doing the same, opening her phone case and clumsily pulling out what she assumes to be her drivers licence, her clammy hands slipping off of the corner a few times. Lo and behold, it’s expired just like Zooble’s…

“Mine’s fine.” A voice in the middle of the couch says. A voice that knows what it’s doing. Suddenly, he chuckles lightly. “Barely.” The remaining five’s eyes immediately find their way to Jax, holding up his licence.

It’s about a month from expiration, the picture being of a pitch-black haired Jax wearing a hoodie, just skimming looking like a confused teenager. Pomni made a random note in her head what his government name was but sort of wished she didn’t. Labelling him as anything except Jax felt almost like an infraction of some unspoken rule somehow.

Kinger glances around before sighing dejectedly. “Jax, could you please go to the grocery store? Please?” He asks slowly and carefully, as if trying to sway his executioner not to pull the lever on the guillotine.

Jax pretends to think about it before shrugging. “Okay.”

He lets that marinate, mingling with everybody else’s shock at the ease of his acceptance, almost too easy. Suspiciously easy.

“But only if Pomni comes with me.” There it is.

Pomni tenses. “W-Why me?”

Jax shrugs again. “I dunno. You were an accountant for a supermarket, I would’ve thought this would be like living the dream for you. Plus, I need a little buddy. I’ll be pretty bored without somebody to talk to.”

All eyes are on her now, pleading pupils just asking her to go with this so they can all get fed at the end of the day. ‘Jax is difficult enough’ they whisper with only a gaze, ‘please just humour him.’

—

Humouring Jax continues to be the worst idea on the planet. Second to nothing.

Decidedly, whenever she does this (which isn’t much for the record) she always regrets it after. You’d think Pomni would learn her lesson about trusting Jax to just be normal. Back in the circus he had the excuse of nothing being normal in his artillery, ‘so why should he?’, ‘he’s just having fun,’ but now they’re in the real world where they’re normal people who are supposed to do normal things. Now he had no excuse to be causing issues.

And yet here he is. Doing that.

Pomni sighs internally. Maybe she’s only doing it to herself for entertaining his insanity every time but there’s only a certain amount of blame that can rest on her shoulders. Either way, the car is happening now, which is honestly sort of a miracle.

Kinger and Ragatha had come outside with them. After cleaning most of the visual disturbances off, Ragatha went back in and Kinger pulled out the keys, turning the car on with a grimace.

They all seemed to hold their breaths in anticipation, or just curiosity, expecting the worst only to be met with a stunned silence as the car rumbled on just fine. Kinger chalked it up to his brother coming over to make sure things were still working in hopes that he’d turn up one day.

Jax had shrugged off the good luck and slipped into the drivers seat, mentioning only after he had pulled out of the driveway and gotten halfway down the street how he ‘wasn’t the best driver’… which is code for being a terrible driver.

The ride was quiet besides the wind whistling in from the window Jax cracked open, completely silent but not necessarily uncomfortable. He had Pomni pull up Google Maps on her phone (all hail) to see where to nearest Walmart was. Before Kinger left he gave them a double sided list of things. Basic necessities alongside the usual grocery list.

Jax drove to the Walmart okay with no major hiccups, parking slowly. Pomni saw how his face scrunched up slightly in concentration as he inched into the white lines, sandwiched between two other cars. As he parked successfully, Jax relaxed into his seat and un-clicked his seatbelt. Pomni did the same.

The two slip out of the car and Jax locks up, taking the lead and grabbing a shopping cart on their way in. Pomni hands him the list and begins to follow him around the store like a small dog. He couldn’t really take a full step while pushing the cart, the front of his ankles hitting the metal shelf underneath the main basket.

She noticed how it was a little challenging to keep up with him, his strides way too long. If he wasn’t handicapped by the cart then she doesn’t know if she could keep up with him at his full walking speed. She noticed how ratty and disheveled his shoes were.

He was tall in the circus but Kinger was a bit above him. But now, Jax towered over everyone despite being the youngest. That youngest factor is probably why his driver’s license wasn’t expired now that she thinks about it.

Her hands still shake, especially in this place. Walmart. A place that she’s undoubtedly been heaps of times before; It’s a fucking Walmart. Yet even so she still trembles at the hundreds of eyes perceived to be on her every inch, tickling the back of her neck, scuttling under her shirt like tiny spiders, laser gazes hitting her at every angle. Blinding.

“Ey, Pomni.”

She snaps out of her own head and reminds herself that while she’s here she might as well be of use. “What’s up?”

“Little mission for you,” Jax says, signature grin creeping onto his face as he stops walking for a second and leans down to show her the list. His thumb rests under a couple of items, slowly trailing down. They’re all some variation of vegetables or fruit. “Go and grab all the stuff from produce, kay?”

Pomni raises an eyebrow at the request, not really surprised that Jax just started telling her what to do. Though, with no other real choices, she just sighs and nods, leaving his side to head towards produce.

She makes short work of it, cradling in her arms a stalk of broccoli, a bag of pre-chopped lettuce, more stuff for salad, tomatoes, onions, cucumber, various fruit, carrots, blah blah blah. It was all just normal stuff she was holding, raw and cold and real.

Unlike everything in the circus, this food felt feasible. It wasn’t threatening to phase through her hand like before and it surely wouldn’t taste like faint echoes of the real thing, no more simulated texture, no more sharp, pixelated edge.

Everything there was so real yet so synthetic and fake, like an imitation of everything Caine thought humans needed, phased into the digital world instantaneously despite the AI having no prior knowledge of what humans actually needed. That which they told him many times. He either didn’t listen or didn’t hear.

Again Pomni shakes herself out of it and tries not to drop everything, making her way out of the aisle. As she gets into the main one she starts walking slowly until she sees a splotch of purple in between the aisles. Heading over, she sees Jax has put a few things in the cart already and he is lazily leaning against the handle bar looking at cheese.

“Got the stuff,” she mumbles, letting it tumble out of her arms into the cart.

“Great.” Jax picks a random cheddar and tosses it in, looking down as he does to survey what she got. He glances back and fourth between the cart and the list before nodding. “All there. Nice.”

Pomni had half expected him to give her another task or send her off to find something he couldn’t be bothered to walk to himself but instead he shrugged and walked on along the aisle, calm as ever. She finds it odd but follows regardless.

Jax goes through the motions of a regular grocery trip, the simple action of seeing him participate in such a domestic, normal activity far too strange for Pomni to ignore. It throws her off kilter, on edge for a good while until he starts talking which eases her discomfort just a little.

It might be the fact that it’s still his voice that’s coming out of a stranger’s mouth. A reassurance that they haven’t really changed at all. Just what they look like. They’re still going to make the same jokes, still going to talk the same, have the same friendship.

Jax has a certain quality (good or bad she can’t tell) of being able to keep up a one-sided conversation remarkably well. Pomni has only said about four things and he’s just been rattling off his train of thought the whole time, sending out whatever is on his mind as it comes.

She doesn’t know if he’s doing it on purpose but something about him just talking is mitigating the stares from dark, scribbled strangers that lurk in her peripheral vision, dulling the feeling of being watched so intensely.

He has this air about him of—and Pomni has thought about this and cannot explain it any other way—‘overwhelming chill.’ When he isn’t tying Gangle’s scarf in knots and probably planning the two-hundred-and-ninth centipede plot to make Ragatha suffer, he’s actually a very calming person to be around. Cool and collected, not a hair out of place. It makes her wonder why nobody bothered to try and befriend him in the circus. Though, then she remembers the sheer volume of cartoonish banana peels he planted for her to slip on and she doesn’t feel so bad.

“So, I was thinking,” Jax begins as another thought seemingly pops into his head. “We’re all…” suddenly he trails off, staring down the aisle with glassy, vacant eyes. Eyes that seem so far away. Pomni blinks a couple of times at him, confused, before following his gaze. Down at the end of produce where she just was.

She can’t pinpoint what he’s looking at but there seems to be pretty normal displays on the end caps which is all she can make out in detail; they’re decently far away. One has a several bunches of cauliflower, the other has half-off corn on the cob probably left over from barbecue season, the price cut due to the approaching autumn.

None of it seems particularly striking to her but when she looks back up at Jax the expression he was wearing is completely gone, almost like it was never there, and he isn’t looking anymore. But his eyes are dilated.

Without a second beat, he continues. “Since we’re all living together now, do you think Kinger will consider my suggestion of replacing the stairs with a giant water slide?”

Pomni chuckles a little. “I think he’ll look at you like you’re insane.”

“Ooh, I got an answer this time,” Jax says, narrowing his eyes at her and smiling. “Riveting. Usually you just stare into the distance with this look of.. what is either intense apathy or unrelenting terror.”

“More like just an underlying sense of dread,” Pomni shrugs, giving him a nod. “Y’know, comes with the trauma package.”

“Ah,” Jax snaps his fingers, moving slowly along the aisle and bending down to lean his arms on the cart’s handle. The lean would’ve felt condescending but by now Pomni has learnt that sometimes it’s necessary, especially since he is the tallest and she is the… second shortest. Also, it’s Jax. What does she want, him to not be condescending?

“I wasn’t aware you premium trauma holders get some of that sweet sweet underlying dread,” Jax says.

“Yeah. Comes with the bronze package,” Pomni chuckles. “You know how it is.” She reaches out to pat his arm in mock sympathy but he swerves the contact by standing up and grabbing something off the shelf.

“And oh, how jealous I am,” he continues, glancing at the list again. “Oh, I think we’re all done in the fridges.” Then he grimaces. “Ew. Never mind, last thing. Who the hell requested mayo?”

“Oh, that’s not in fridges. That’s like, somewhere near the other sauces. Probably just before we get to candy and cereal and stuff,” Pomni says before she can stop herself.

Jax looks down and raises an eyebrow. “You been here before or something?”

Pomni shrinks a little. “I was a supermarket accountant, remember? I’m ‘living the dream.’”

After dropping her air quotes, Jax chuckles. “Oh yeah. Just wasn’t aware you had so much wisdom.

“I don’t, really,” Pomni sighs. “Just experience in a really boring industry. I think my old store stole a nearby Target’s exact floor plan.”

“Damn,” Jax smiles, “Maybe you should be leading this trip, oh wise one.”

“It’s a grocery store, I’m sure you can handle it.”

“So helpful Pomni.”

“Well, you could always send me on another errand. Like I’m a little errand boy.”

“Okay errand boy,” Jax says, chuckling. “Why don’t you go and grab some of this stuff from the, like, home section. I don’t know what it’s called.”

“Housewares,” Pomni corrects. “And okay. What do we need?”

Jax leans over and shows her the list, using his thumb as a pointer again. “Looks like some lightbulbs; pyjamas for everybody. Oh look, we even have sizes; other clothes cause, well, we only have the ones we’re wearing; aaaand, I think a couple more cleaning supplies. I assume the ones you guys left in the cabinets were pretty nasty.”

“You don’t even know.” Pomni shivers. “But yeah, that sounds doable. Be right back, I guess.”

“Have fun, errand boy.”

—

Housewares gives her sort of a reason to relax. It’s all soft blankets and inoffensive colours and not many people. Much less oppressive for some reason. She doesn’t know why but not having Jax next to her feels strange now.

Either way she presses on, making her way past all the aisles for children and babies and finding the adult sleepwear. A little frozen in front of all the choices, Pomni frowns.

The amount of options is overwhelming. She doesn’t know what everyone likes or would want and a huge selection like this would usually cause her to just give up and leave in the face of so many options, so many that could be the wrong one. However, in the interest of getting this done quickly and making sure they’d be comfortable tonight Pomni presses on, the idea that these would only be temporary soothing her for now.

She’s learnt to ‘deal with it’ a lot more recently. In the circus the uncomfortable things that would unsettle them would just have to be ignored, a skill they all picked up just before it was too late.

She can’t quite explain why all the choice makes her just shut down sometimes. Before all of this they were always at Caine’s mercy, unburdened by the suffocation of choice for so long.

Now it’s different, it’s just too much and she doesn’t want to mess everything up, like every choice is the wrong one and will somehow end in catastrophic disaster. But that isn’t true so she steps forward and picks the most generic ones she can find. Pants and t-shirt in some basic colours and in all the sizes that were written on the list. It’s easier that way.

Like she’s a robot she steps methodically from aisle to aisle, adding extra clothes, cleaning supplies, light bulbs to the bundle in her arms.

It’s quick work and as much as she hates to admit it, being Jax’s errand boy is distracting enough for her to ignore the stares. Again, she’s quick about it, making her way out of housewares and back to where she thinks Jax is.

He is, lazily skim reading the packet of dishwasher tablets he’s picked up and leaning against the handle of the cart. There’s a fair few more things in the basket below suggesting he’d been around a good chunk of the store. Pomni approaches the cart.

“Got the stuff,” she says, dropping her items in.

“Wow, you don’t sound like a drug dealer.” Jax chuckles at his own joke. “Looks like everything is there. Nice.”

“You’d know, Walter White.”

Jax snickers and eyes her. “Oh, you get it.” Suddenly, the feeling she gets from being with him is now annoyance.

And she ignores Jax, going on about whatever comes to his mind. While she’s grateful for him mostly carrying the conversation, she has her own question to ask, or rather, her own statement but she can’t find the right words and it accidentally just spills out.

“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” Pomni says quickly during a lapse in conversation. Jax blinks incredulously.

“When—?“ he interrupts himself, face doing all sorts of things. “How did you—?”

“At the train station I heard you talking on the phone.” She lets her gaze fall to the floor. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I couldn’t understand anyway.”

He chuckles a little, still surprised. “It’s fine, hah. Yeah, I’m Mexican, so…”

“Huh,” she smiles. “I had no idea! Your English is amazing.”

He shrugs. “Perks of being raised bilingual, I guess. Came with virtually no accent, too. Though maybe that’s just because I’ve been living in America for ages.”

“Huh. I’ve always heard of kids like and thought how cool it would be. It’s almost like learning a second language for free without having to go through the struggle of being a total beginner, or at least not remembering it..” She smiles. “I’m all American. Been here all my life, white trash n’ all.”

“Booooooring,” he teases before laughing and glancing down at the list again. “Just kidding,” he says, two words she doesn’t think she’s ever heard him say sincerely. Or maybe it wasn’t sincere. Either way it’s rare.

“How long were you in Mexico for?”

Though his answers halt for longer, have more gaps between them and the question, Jax still answers eventually. “Ehh, eighteen years, give or take?”

“Wow,” Pomni chuckles, “eager to leave the nest then?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I didn’t leave the second I turned eighteen but, I mean, nobody would’ve noticed if I did.” Jax chuckles. “I got too much carpal tunnel from holding garden sheers that were twice the size of me. I mean, those things probably weighed more too, felt like a lamppost, especially when I was smaller.”

Pomni raises an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Oh—“ Jax’s voice does a weird kind of stammer, his eyes darting away for a second to contemplate something unreadable, a secret he holds under an airtight promise of confidentiality between him and himself. Or maybe that’s her overthinking and it’s just a glance away. He recollects himself in an instant, so quick it’s almost unnoticeable.

“I used to live on a farm when I was younger,” he says, shrugging and pushing the cart forward again slowly. His tone is casual, saying the words with complete indifference, but his white-knuckled grip on the handle of the cart tells a different story.

“Like Ragatha?” Pomni asks almost instantly. She doesn’t really consider the possibility that he doesn’t want to disclose it.

“Yeah. Sorta.”

Though, that’s her only evidence it isn’t just a part of his backstory, a regular kid on a farm in Mexico, someone completely average. But that grip is telling her something else.

She can’t be sure, especially after just hearing about it a couple of seconds ago. It isn’t the time to be speculating but there is a story his grip is telling her, a whisper she can’t decode. There’s something there but Pomni can’t understand it yet, can’t read its cyphers or understand its words.

She blinks a couple of times in surprise, stuttering out a, “Cool.”

He shrugs again, maybe out of habit, maybe just because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Manual labour at seven isn’t exactly the greatest thing for your back.”

“Ooh, yeah, didn’t really consider that part.”

The former rabbit goes oddly silent after that, for only a moment, but quickly picks up the pace of conversation again. “Yeah, sort of brutal but not helping was a big no. I didn’t get much time to do much else but I had siblings to play with.”

Pomni chuckles a bit but can’t really let the tightness out of her chest. Realising she’s been mostly matching his energy this whole time, it’s hard to relax when he’s speaking almost flawlessly laid-back but still inexplicably guarded and wary.

As soon as the topic of the farm came up there’s been this knot in his shoulders, that merciless, white-knuckled grip on the cart handle that is just staring her in the face. Maybe it’s paranoia, maybe it’s residual unease, maybe it’s completely imaginary but something about the way he carries himself now is so, so wrong.

“You have fun there?” Pomni asks hesitantly, choosing her words with extreme caution.

“Mostly.” Jax’s eyes don’t leave his hands. “I had games to play with neighbours and my siblings. Hide and seek and tag and stuff. And maíz maze.” Jax’s eyebrows knit together the slightest amount, not more than a millimetre. But it’s there, like he’s sharing some sick joke with himself. A laugh that sounds bitter and tired comes up. “They hated that one.”

After a strategic change of subject from Jax, what feels like a miracle that both seem to be grateful for, the rest of their trip goes smoothly. Mostly

Maybe she pried too far, maybe he answered because he was worn out. From all of this new stuff that felt old enough to snap off and break, from all of the things that should have been familiar. Maybe it made him be worn down quicker and with less resistance than in the circus.

He hadn’t actually answered when asked what he did in the real world back then, in the bar during the lightning round. Maybe this conversation was what he was avoiding, drawn up through weariness and a resolve that’d left him long ago. Maybe he just saw no point in keeping it locked away anymore.

Pomni still thinks of it on the drive home, scenery pulling away past the rain-spotted windows. Whether he intended to share that much, what it all meant. Whether those small signs in the moment were just her underused imagination stretching its wings.

It wouldn’t matter though. Would probably never come up again. At least that’s what she thought initially on that drive home. Before she knew better.

Chapter Text

The day only seems to get darker and duskier the more time goes on. The rain intensifies, thumping on the windows of the car on the drive home. Pomni gazes out of them, not really paying any attention at all.

Dark clouds clump up above, the beginnings of a storm thinly concealed with telling navy cotton. Fragile. The overcast sky promises persistence, threatening to lock them inside with a rainstorm.

Her eyes flit over to the man in the drivers seat. His face is neutral. Not ‘normal,’ just nothing, unreadable, sealed behind an iron shield and that frustratingly ambiguous look. She can still tell something’s weird though, able to almost smell his discomfort yet she’s still too afraid to ask about it. Afraid that there will be a perfectly logical explanation she’ll end up the idiot.

Pomni, on the one hand, could reach out and ask what’s going on. On the other… she could do what she always does: clam up until it’s too late. It feels already like the decision has been made for her.

They get home after an endless fifteen minutes and as they haul the grocery bags in through the door (arms loaded since Jax refuses to do more than one trip), Pomni can only take notice as the expression flattens easily into one of his usual five. With practiced ease, Jax settles back into that unchanging persona, that iron maiden buckled in at the back of his head.

Ragatha has done a stellar job at cleaning up. In only an hour and a half. It makes Pomni wonder whether Rags was lying about what she did when she said before and whether or not she secretly ran a cleaning business.

Most spider webs have been rid of (probably much to the mild chagrin of Kinger), dust and debris swept, mess tidied and put away. There’s still some things to be done, cracks in the wallpaper, creaks in the stairs. It almost looks like a home, save for the fact that nobody is currently in it.

They dump the grocery bags on the kitchen counter, Pomni releasing a tired huff as she does. Heavy, blue Walmart bags thunk down on the countertops, Jax immediately retreating to the living room.

She follows as he walks. It is only once they’re both in there, Jax does a long sigh and they stand for a moment does it really set in that there is No One Here.

The two seem to notice it at the same time, the silence in the room ringing louder than speech. Slowly, Jax turns to her, relaxed, and asks, “Where is everyone?”

“Upstairs?” Pomni suggests, nodding her head in the direction of the stairs.

Jax narrows his eyes. “Yeah maybe. C’mon, let’s check.”

They ascend up the stairs, each one creaking a different way. It’s not long up, the two reaching the landing in no time at all. The upstairs hasn’t been reached by Ragatha yet, still riddled with cobwebs and dust. It’s evident where the remaining four have gone; all doors but one are closed. Outside it, Gangle, Ragatha and Zooble stand, looking inside.

Pomni gives Jax a puzzled look. He shrugs and then takes a few steps forward, strolling up to the doorway and leaning on it. Pomni follows, peering out from past Ragatha’s shoulder. Said woman turns around and gives her a startled look.

“You’re back,” Rags almost whispers.

“Yeah,” Pomni says, almost subconsciously matching the volume of her voice. “What’s going on? Why are you all up here?”

Ragatha frowns and sighs softly, tipping her head in front of her.

Pomni’s eyes follow the movement. Kinger is inside the room, kneeling over something on the bed that she can’t see.

He’s at the side of a double bed, shoulders hunched slightly as he holds what looks to be a box. It’s open, though Pomni can’t see in detail what’s inside.

He takes a long breath, eyes fixed on the box like there’s nothing else in the room. A soft, melancholic smile plays on his lips and suddenly Pomni feels as if looking at this is deeply wrong. Like she’s watching a private moment unfold in a glass room. Kinger seems to blossom and wilt simultaneously, the two mixing and manifesting a quiet stillness. The air feels thick with emotion. Pomni thanks Jesus that Jax doesn’t say anything wildly tone-deaf.

Kinger glances up at them over his shoulder, seemingly acknowledging that everybody is now here. His eyes seem duller than before and Pomni can’t help something in her curl with fright. But she supposes it’s needless; it won’t spell death anymore. It’s not the end of the world if one of them goes off the deep end. It doesn’t help.

Turning the box to them, Kinger stays silent. Subconsciously, everybody seems to lean closer.

It’s a jewellery box sparsely populated with extravagant pendants, pearls and adornments and ivory pieces galore. It looks expensive, old. Like it’d been sitting there for years. And it had.

Pomni’s eyes gleam at the sight of them before she briefly looks to everybody else. Gangle and Ragatha look similar to her. Jax and Zooble seem mildly surprised. As she looks back, Pomni starts to notice the individual pieces in there.

There are little silver earrings all neatly lined at the back, pinched between velvety fabric, each meticulously maintained and shined to perfection. There are one or two bracelets, iridescent pearls, delicate chains, matte beads and gold. Some pendants stick out against the lid, necklace chains pinned behind a pocket. One is a small diamond, one is a ruby. Then there are rings, each ring slot filled with equally finely crafted pieces. Except for the last. Every one is filled, leaving the empty slot a screaming hole.

As everybody’s eyes drift from the box to Kinger, he smiles at them but it’s pointedly performative. “I think it was Queenie’s,” he says simply, before turning back and closing the box with the utmost care and attention. As if he was holding a butterfly.

—

It had been a few days since the initial madness and cleaning and grocery trip. Kinger had managed to sort the bills out, Ragatha had cleaned the house and the rest had awkwardly divvied up the remaining the chores on a chart like they were college roommates and not a traumatised group of mixed-age, unsociable people. Unsociable with each other, at least.

Zooble had got a night shift job at a bar somewhere deep into the city. A bar, they said one night coming home, where the air tasted of whiskey and gloom. It wasn’t a place where average people would really go, settled awkwardly between an old building and a vape shop deep into the alleyways and labyrinths of the big city. Zooble wasn’t bothered by that though. Seeing normal wasn’t something they wanted. Not yet.

Gangle had taken to drawing. A lot. Shock horror. The girls (plus Zooble) had gone out to get some groceries for lunch and had returned with a small bundle of art supplies. She hadn’t been able to stop after that, head buried in a sketchbook at almost all hours of the day, pencil working sharply. She mentioned over dinner a couple of nights ago that she’d been trying to sell what she made.

Kinger had been insistent on figuring out how they’d all gotten wrapped up in that mess in the first place, the mess of the circus, of C&A. He didn’t have a cork board with red string and Polaroid photos but he may as well have. He’d been more-or-less writing down everything he remembered in a notebook he’d found and had mostly been quite protective of it, dismissing the topic whenever it was mentioned. No one in that house wanted to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Everybody knew he meant well but wondered under their breaths whether it was good for him.

Ragatha had been keeping herself busy since they moved in (‘moved in?’). She had got a job at an animal shelter nearby which paid decently and didn’t give her too many hours. She cleaned almost obsessively, cooked on her nights, wrote little sticky notes on the bathroom mirror that Jax would crumple up and throw at her later in the day. It all felt an awful lot like she was compensating for something she felt she couldn’t give them. Although maybe that was only how Pomni saw it.

Jax had also been busying himself with some… unknowns lately. He’d been playing a sort of Fill In The Blanks with them at day, having them guess what he’d been doing. And on nights when he thought nobody noticed, he’d slip out at midnight for hours at a time, take a hushed phone call in Spanish again. Sometimes the space he left felt so empty Pomni wouldn’t be surprised if he never came back. It all felt like a convenient front, like he saw the golden opportunity to pass off his shady behaviour as a game and snatched it up. It felt like he was protecting something. Even past the thickly woven walls he fortified every time he felt threatened, Pomni saw through it now. Even despite the fact that when they got out everybody felt like strangers. She still knew him after all.

Oh, and Pomni. She shakes less now. Finding work had been… hard, not wanting to get tangled up in the web of corporate accounting yet also unwilling to be ruthlessly bullied about trying YouTube again. Nothing much is new. Aside from the fact that she’s getting slightly more accustomed to being human again. Learning how to eat, learning how to socialise, how to do the most normal things like brushing her hair without bursting into tears. Re-learning how to live had been… hard. To say the absolute least.

It’s strange now to wake up and see a real house in the real world, strange to wake up and be somebody instead of some 3D model in a plastic imitation of the world. But she doesn’t do anything about it because she’s stuck here now and she surely doesn’t want to go back. So, stuck in this transit zone, she just waits for it to feel normal. It eventually did in the circus and she’s happy to pretend to think it will work the same now.

She’s almost lost now. In the circus they had direction, they had something to do every day with a constructed routine perfectly curated for them (even if sometimes the adventures they went on increased the suffering instead of discouraging it).

They’d assigned rooms. Zooble and Gangle shared the guest room, Kinger kept his original room, Jax took sanctuary in the garage and Ragatha and Pomni had set something resembling a bedroom up in the office. And each member of their new dysfunctional household was wholly willing to pretend that it wasn’t happening, that each day saying these names and adapting these routines it wasn’t feeling awfully similar to what they had before. Because nobody would admit it. Nobody would dare.

Pomni hasn’t been in many of them, only seen when they helped Ragatha clean the upstairs. The only one she’s seen in greater detail besides hers and Ragatha’s is Jax’s. It was similar to what one would describe as a ‘man cave’ except a little more bare bones. Mattress on the floor, already somehow messy with clothes everywhere, pile of books for a bedside table, lamp on that and some snacks he’d bought at some point.

The rest of the garage was in a state. Jax had cleared a space on the floor for himself but the rest of it was left in the disaster it’d grown into. Old pallets made of plywood stacked in the corner, car maintenance tool kits, regular tool kits, cans of wall paint in boring colours. He’d made it his own though, using whatever he found in there. He seemed particularly interested in an old guitar in the corner. It looked like it’d been re-strung a few times, beaten and worn and played to death. The interest made her briefly wonder if he used to be a thrifter and go looking for original pieces or vintage finds in nieces of the city.

He at least seemed content there, like that claiming the space nobody else really wanted was somehow vindicating to him, like it was a victory. Maybe it was, in his head, in a world where everything Jax did made sense. A world filled with dusty books and strong opinions.

Pomni and Ragatha’s room wasn’t the greatest—they had to squeeze a double mattress on the floor and block off each of their sides with pillows which definitely wasn’t awkward—but it was what they had and they vowed to work with it. (And they had both banned comparisons to childhood sleepovers at the arrangement, no ‘this is my side and that’s yours and if we cross it we’re gay!’ No sir.)

There was a desk that looked too heavy to move so the two squeezed into what little space they had. Each had about half a backpacks worth of belongings which isn’t saying much. That was just kept at the foot of the bed. It didn’t exactly feel like home yet but that was okay. Pomni hadn’t felt like she had a real home since she was about seventeen.

Bouncing from job to job, cheap apartment to cheap apartment, city to city. It all started to look the same, smell the same. Just houses in streets she couldn’t recognise even after years. Addresses she couldn’t remember. What really was the difference besides labels and names when all she saw every night no matter where she went was a light-polluted, empty sky.

Something inside Pomni, something dark and wriggling, hated the whole rooms arrangement. It only felt natural at that point, obvious. Like obviously they would have designated spaces for each of them that they’d lay claim over. But she hated that it was natural, that something like their rooms, their appearances, their interactions and relationships. They were all fostered in that place. That magnified, discoloured, oblong reality. Where nothing made sense, not even within their minds. It was only inevitable she fester some sort of grudge without a target.

She hated how it made sense, how normal it was even detached from the association with the circus she couldn’t free herself of. And she hated having to need it. Because something within Pomni—within everyone—was starting to need the structure that Caine and the circus provided. What little structure they had and craved and refused altogether. Pomni hadn’t known until it was gone how she’d grown to rely on it, tree branches wrapping a road sign. Two forces that were never meant to collide yet becoming one anyway.

—

Pomni noticed long before the rest, in the grocery store. Though the first sign everyone else got was a week after rooms were claimed. There was a tiny crumb, one small moment, that tipped them off that Jax’s towering walls were starting to crack.

He’d been doing an almost flawless job, at least after the cold shock of the real world had worn off. Pomni understands deep down that she knows very little of the real Jax; not much of what he said or did in the circus was truly genuine, but she could still vaguely garner his general personality and interests from the little he eluded here and there. However, this was entirely different. Hardly natural—it was like somebody had hired a very good actor to play Jax in a theatre show. Still ‘himself’ technically, just something was askew.

It made her feel crazy sometimes, like he was a crumpled piece of paper with creases and imperfections only Pomni seemed to notice. She wondered if the rips and tears were shoddily hidden and everyone could see or if she just had a trained eye for broken people.

It was around seven PM, Jax’s turn to cook dinner. He always put the least amount of effort into what he made, soups, pastas, boring things. Cooking that didn’t require much cognitive function so he could reserve it for making fun of Gangle’s movie choices while tensely stirring a pot. It all made her wonder what he was really thinking about during those times though, what things could be going through his head. She thought about the grocery store often, overanalysing every twitch, every little stutter, trying to find meaning in the thick soup of uncertainty. She’d latch onto that for a long while since it was the only thing that was tangible. Since clutching a gut feeling will turn it to mush in your hands. And she had no idea then what she was in for.

Every night, the rest would pick out a movie and watch it while the one left to cook would do their thing in the kitchen. There wasn’t a door to the kitchen, open concept, so nobody felt too quarantined. Jax could still watch the movie what with the only thing he had to do being mindlessly stir a pot. Which is why it struck Pomni as odd when he just. Wasn’t.

Spaced out almost, every time she’d look at him he’d be staring into some kind of middle distance with a blank expression, hand moving the wooden spoon he held in the pasta pot mechanically. As if put on autopilot while his mind was left to wander.

***

She tries her hardest not to think anything of it (except she’d seen this behaviour before and it was telling of something undesirable). Pomni still sits here on the couch and tries to pay attention to the movie. One Zooble chose, some crime drama. It’s complicated web of plot is hard to focus on.

It’s until the episode becomes vocal that everyone notices.

Pomni starts hearing panting behind her. She, Gangle and Ragatha turn around to see Jax standing stiffly at the stove, shoulders shuddering up and down, eyes locked to the counter.

Feeling a jolt of panic surge up her spine at the sight, Pomni glances at Ragatha who shares her expression. The woman stands up and does her best not to draw attention to herself or the situation. Although it’s already too late; Kinger and Zooble’s eyes have already been subverted.

Ragatha inches closer, Pomni getting up to follow. It’s a magnetic need to approach that she can’t fully understand, only she knows she has to. Things start to happen too quickly. Ragatha has a trained calmness to her expression, although the knot in her shoulders and the furrow in her brow betrays her concern. She still steps closer, as if the floor is a glass bridge splitting beneath her feet. Pomni copies her movements, if only to see the situation closer.

Ragatha clears her throat, timidly asking, “Jax?”

The man in front of them is almost unrecognisable. Not only does he not respond but it looks like he didn’t even hear her. His body is locked in place, feet rooted to the floor, white-knuckle grip on the spoon and the counter—the same white-knuckle grip he had on the shopping cart handle. And that’s all that she can make out, this toughened elytra sealing the sensitive mess beneath it.

As Pomni gets ever closer, she can see his eyes now, past the locks of hair that drip down his temples. They look empty, distant, as if looking into a pocket of the void no one else could see. Like he had taken himself away from the situation despite the domesticity of it. There was no threat, no apparent trigger, no reason for this reaction. It made Pomni wonder briefly whether this was a new thing.

“Jax? Are you okay?” Ragatha asks mildly again. This time he hears, head dragging itself in her direction as he staggers back, letting go of his two anchors to the counter. It’s a feeble withdrawal, two rickety, unstable steps backwards.

Gaze phasing through them both as he glances around, Jax’s breathing becomes more erratic and his hands shake like rickety bridges threatening imminent collapse. Rotting wood. He hits the counter behind him and leans back against it heavily, pressing his heels into the floorboards to hold himself up, only just balancing upright like the insides of his legs were hollowed out and filled up with sloshing water. He blinks long and hard, once, twice, three times like something is in his eyes. They seem to darken, widen, crawl with something infested. He stands clunky like he’s forgotten how.

Ragatha seems to know better than to approach, however the stall as she begins to and then doubles back makes it clear she wants nothing more. She closes her eyes for a second, steeling herself. Pomni then tries a firmer, “Jax, what’s wrong?” There is silence for a long, suffocated second after. The air is thin.

Jax’s eyes seem to look through them all, staring vaguely into the middle distance and then back down to his hands, flitting between the two back and forth. He does not try to regulate, only allows himself to slip further, only sways and finally manages to grasp the counter behind him after many clumsy attempts.

Ragatha shoots Pomni a worried glance before she starts to move towards him again, treating every careful second like it’s glass, testing the bounds like they change every time. Jax begins to palm at his elbows, drawing into himself, his breath hitching, getting stuck like he’s choking on it.

As Rags approaches and he catches her out of the corner of his eye, Jax flinches fiercely away, letting out a startled noise through all of the gasps and collapsing against the cupboards. He lands awkwardly, bashes his head and traps his arm in the corner of them, yelping in pain and then clawing for oxygen again through a vicious, frightened cycle. His pupils fix to her as he frees his arm despite Ragatha not moving a muscle. He stares, unchanging and erratically focused, irises sharpened with too much definition, tunnel visioned into what he seems to think is happening. He stares pointedly at her, spurred by alarm bells, looking not at Ragatha but at what he thinks she’s going to do next, like it’s all playing out in front of him before it has happened.

Ragatha crouches in front of him and takes a deep breath. She does her best to look him in the eyes and put on a brave face, the face of somebody she knows can understand. Pomni can only watch from where she stands. The one thing she thinks to do is turn the stove off.

As he’s slowly submerged back into the thick middle distance, Pomni only sees it because she’s looking. Little tiny marks bitten into his skin already marred with scars. He almost growls all of a sudden, a raw sound that fills his throat. As he focuses back on her, fighting his way out of that dissociated fog, he presses back again.

Jax still gasps for air, face contorting, arms curled in to shield from a blow. His hair is tousled from all the motion, brow crumpled, sweat shimmering on his skin under the light. His eyes are dizzyingly swirled with unshed tears that refuse to relent. There is something buried there. Some belief he will not let go.

“Jax,” Ragatha states firmly, voice noticeably louder and tone steady. “You’re safe. You need to breathe.”

All that escapes Jax’s mouth is a small, brittle squeak, happening between desperate attempts for oxygen, pupils blown wide and whole world spinning wildly out of control. His eyes stay trapped by her though, cradled by what appears to be a promise of safety.

Ragatha inches nearer to him. He still flinches but it’s less than before, muted. She starts to take exaggerated breaths for him to copy, gentle gaze still captivating his as she drops to a crawl and shifts nearer like a cat hunting low to the ground, trying not to be seen.

In the smallest, lightest increments, Jax seems to make some vague attempt to copy her. He manages to slow down a fair bit but is still left breathless and panting. That’s when Ragatha stands up, bent over him, offering him a hand to get up. She casts a shadow over half of his body, though his eyes still seem to stay alight.

Jax stares at it. Hard. Like he’s trying to pick it apart and see what’s inside. And for the first time, his expression betrays him, as clear as glass.

Etched on his face isn’t disgust. He’s not upset because he’s being offered help. Instead it’s fear which lines his features, sinks into the cracks of his skin, as if he’s being lured into a trap every second he merely entertains the idea. Like he’s already seen through a lie that isn’t there. In Jax’s eyes swirls dark, pooling fear. A deep tar ocean of doubt, of overwhelming lightning screaming No. A vow struck into his bones. As if the action has cursed him forever.

And he looks like he’s seen it before. That’s when his face turns to anger.

Jax’s eyes slice through her hand, that kind of silent rage Pomni had seen before during the stargazing adventure, hating something indiscernible. Everything screws up—fists, the corners of his eyes, the space between his eyebrows. Trembling anger discharged in a thrashing current through the floor. Something only he can see. Despite him not moving a muscle, Pomni can almost read his thoughts. The only thing is that she doesn’t understand them, like reading a book in a language you can’t speak.

Though, to probably all their surprise, Jax reaches his hand up slowly from where it’s clutching his other arm and takes hold of Ragatha’s wrist. He uses more force than is probably necessary and pulls. It’s short lived, he only uses it to hoist himself up, nearly tugging Ragatha down in the process. After that’s achieved, Jax wobbles, catches himself on the counter and then quickly makes a break for the garage. Walking faster, keeping his head down and upon reaching the door, he closes it a bit harder than he needed to.

And the room is left in utter silence after that.

“Did he just…?” Gangle asks, trailing off in sheer disbelief as Ragatha dejectedly dusts her dress off.

“Well,” Zooble murmurs, “this was not on my Jax bingo card.” Their voice is controlled and unbothered, though as they turn their attention to their phone the twinge in their brow gives away who they’re messaging.

Ragatha steadies herself and takes one final deep breath, clearing away all the residual emotion on her face, wiping wetness from her lashes. She then smiles wearily and asks, “Everybody okay?”

Upon scattered, awkward mutters of agreement, Ragatha nods and then confronts the abandoned pot on the stove, turning it back on and resuming dinner where Jax left off with practiced ease. She picks up the loose ends he left behind so easily it almost looks like impulse.

Pomni can only reserve herself and return to where she was, go back and pretend she’s not reflexively looking behind her every five minutes. And it’s weirder than before, weirder than the sort of constant buzz of weird Pomni feels churning away in the background these days. Sitting watching the movie a little quieter, with a presence missing, with Ragatha cooking dinner on a night that isn’t hers to cook.

—

After that, Pomni didn’t really know where to go from there. The last time she confronted Jax on his emotions, he freaked out on her and self sabotaged by uprooting their entire friendship.

Maybe it was just better to forget, to pretend she had forgotten, at least in front of Jax. She decided to wash her hands of it, running the tap over them in the bathroom the next night. It was nice to feel the cool water soothe her hands, though in the end it all seemed just to turn to static.

The numbness on her palms brought a stillness to the moment, but the noisy pounding on the door interrupted whatever it was in an instant. Pomni hurried and finished washing them, slipping past Jax who gave her a performative grin and then slinked into the bathroom.

The very few things he said and did after it happened were in character, per se, but they didn’t exactly feel genuine, that much was obvious. And it was understandable. Sort of. Pomni is sure she wouldn’t want to confront that situation head on and vulnerable either. And if there’s one thing she’d learnt about Jax through all of this, it’s that being vulnerable was his absolute worst nightmare.

But things were quiet. Nobody was kicking off at each other and Pomni wasn’t about to look that gift horse in the mouth.

Though worrying was forever in her blood. Jax wasn’t himself and against her better judgement, Pomni wanted to find out why. Although poking that bear was a horrific idea. So instead Pomni decided to consult the beehive.

A week after the incident, Pomni opens the door to hers and Ragatha’s room and sees the other ready for bed, on her side of the pillows with a book in hand. The window on the far wall lights up her red hair with moonlight.

Pomni steps onto her side, tugging the blanket over herself and glancing in the other woman’s direction. Book in hand, she stares at it, eyes half lidded and not actually reading so much as staring at the ink on the page. Ragatha’s expression has always exposed her emotions.

As Pomni’s gaze lingers a little longer, Ragatha seemingly snaps herself out of it and closes the book with a sharp thump of pages, placing it beside the mattress and sighing shortly. She spares Pomni a weary look and smiles. “Goodnight, Pomni.”

Reluctantly, as if on the cusp of a skydive, Pomni says, “Goodnight.”

And Ragatha flicks the lamp off and she and Pomni lie down side by side. Here in the dark, Pomni almost feels both of their thoughts come out like smoke as they breathe, mingle in the air, have a silent conversation. What Pomni wants to ask is pretty damn obvious. By the time she begins the talk, it feels like it’s already over.

“What happened in the kitchen a week ago?” She whispers. For a second, Pomni thinks Ragatha’s asleep and that she missed her chance.

Turned away from her, curls falling down her back, split ends clinging to her sleep shirt. Ragatha sighs heavily and rolls languidly onto her back. Pomni’s hands clench each other tighter, afraid as to what she’s breached, fearful of every step she takes closer to the truth. Although every step is made in darkness.

Ragatha seems to consider an answer. It isn’t clear how much she knows, just that she does. “Jax having a panic attack? I don’t know why that happened.”

Her tone is dismissive, defensive almost. Pomni tries again, left unsatisfied. “But you knew what to do. Has he done that before?”

“In the circus?” Rags asks before huffing shortly, never taking her eyes off the popcorn ceiling. “You knew the circumstances there. I’m pretty sure everybody did at some point.”

“You’re generalising,” Pomni says quietly before clearing her throat. “Did Jax? Specifically.”

There’s a thick silence which fills the air, rendering Ragatha stiff and uncomfortable. “Yes. He did.”

Pomni nods, yet the answer only raises more questions, little creatures popping up in her game of whack-a-mole every time she hit one. Her words dissolve on her tongue every time she thinks of something to say. Nothing feels right, nothing feels like it will lead to an answer.

“And you… helped with that?”

“Yes. We used to—“ Ragatha comes to a stop, lips flattening into a line across her face, eyes trying to clear. “Why are you so interested all of a sudden?” The woman next to her finally turns to join looks. And in her eyes shines a quiet uncertainty which glimmers like unshed tears. Holding it back.

Pomni swallows. “I just. I’m worried.”

“Worried?” Ragatha’s brow furrows. She sits up on her elbow, “What for? Aside from what happened he’s just been regular old Jax. So far so good, right?”

“Oh, come on,” suddenly slips out, Pomni unable to bite it back. “You haven’t seen through him by now? It’s obviously just him trying to… trick everyone.”

“Trick everyone?”

“Like, make us all think everything’s just fine now? He’s just got the world’s most believable poker face, I guess. Ragatha, it’s all just—just not okay.”

“Pomni,” Ragatha sighs, an almost bitter smile teasing her lips before she shoos it away, “nobody buys it, I promise you. Jax hasn’t been okay in years, just everybody stopped trying after a while.”

Pomni’s brow instantly furrows, a dangerous question prowling in her throat and jumping out before she can catch it. “You just gave up on him?”

Something in Ragatha’s expression shifts, like blocks in a tower slightly misaligning only for the entire structure to come crashing down. In a single blink her face changed, hurt like she’d been turned away at the door for something better. Weight crashes down on her shoulders, settling into the grooves it’s worn down on her shoulders. She purses her lips.

“I…” Ragatha’s eyes suddenly avoid hers, trailing down to the mattress beneath them. She sighs heavily. “Well. If that’s what you want to call it. I know you two are friends, sort of, but trust me Pomni. It’s not worth it. There are reasons that people don’t talk to him.“

Pomni blinks incredulously. “What kind of reasons? What makes him not worth helping to you?”

Ragatha takes a stringy breath in before letting it out all at once. “Do you think I sat back and watched for a second? Do you think I like it this way? I tried so hard to be there for him that he ended up not wanting me there at all. I have tried over and over and over but it’s never seemed to reach him. Maybe he would be a bit different if I just tried harder, despite everything. But I just can’t anymore.”

Ragatha sighs shakily, voice trembling the slightest bit. “I know what he wants everyone to believe isn’t true, but you have to dig so deep to uncover it. I don’t know if I can anymore, not going on like this. And I don’t want you to either. If anyone knows how he can be, it’s me. I don’t want him to shut you out like he did everyone else. I don’t want you to lose each other.”

Guilt starting to fester in her throat, Pomni hesitantly places a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Y-You’re right. And you shouldn’t have to do that alone anymore.”

Before either of them can discuss it further, a sudden question pops into her head. One she can’t contain. One that would explain it all. It sprouts in her mind, taking root and spreading spores into her mouth. The urge to ask only builds like a rising sneeze, an itch she has to scratch, if simply for her own sanity.

“Did uh,” Pomni begins cautiously. “Did something happen? To make him so…?”

Ragatha suddenly blinks and laughs shakily. “Uh, I-I wasn’t supposed to—Um. I’m sorry, I—“

Pomni then squeezes her shoulder. “You obviously care about him, and if he shuts everybody out there’s gotta be a reason, right? I don’t care if it takes a thousand years or strapping him to a chair to talk about his feelings, I’m gonna do whatever it takes. Even if he yells at me again or tries to upset me. I don’t care. I know his tricks now and I’m not finished with this until it’s over.”

Something seems to move deeply within the machinery of Ragatha’s heart, softening at the words, shifting more fluidly—rusty as it may be. She gives her an uneasy smile before lying back down and sighing thickly. A steady weight looms over them, that same thickness in the air.

“Believe it or not,” begins Ragatha, slowly and deliberately choosing her words. “There actually was a time where Jax wasn’t horrible to people.”

Pomni feels herself unwind slightly at that. “I’m uh, glad to hear that.”

“He had friends. I was one of them. We actually… talked, without it being a fight or just a way to try and hurt each other.” Ragatha says carefully. “Before you arrived, obviously Kaufmo was there, but so were a couple others. Like Dobby and…”

There’s a shift in Ragatha’s face now, eyelids lowering as she glances down at her hands. “And Ribbit.”

Pomni frowns. “Sounds like they’re important in this story?”

“They were.” Ragatha says, a somber smile whispered on her face. It dissolves shortly after it appears. “Attached at the hip, those two. They were inseparable. Even after the worst things happened, they always had each other. After Ribbit abstracted, Jax and Kaufmo were the ones to find them, and I just… Jax just wouldn’t listen to me when I—He wasn’t the same after that.”

Pomni’s brow furrows and as she opens her mouth to say something, Ragatha clears her throat and starts again. “I think he’s scared. Some of the choices he made back then, even ones he had to make, to protect himself, I think they still haunt him. When I saw what was happening, I couldn’t help myself but it was just never enough. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse sometimes. I think he just—“ Ragatha sighs and gestures with her hands. “Jax burns bridges because he can’t stomach crossing them.”

“He’s not your problem anymore,” Pomni says suddenly. “He’s got other people who care about him, okay? Don’t feel solely responsible. Were in this together now.”

There in Ragatha’s eyes there shines a shellshocked, silent guilt, a little worry settled in her heart. It shimmers on her bottom lid, stuck to her eyelashes. But she nods despite it. And smiles too. It’s overflowing with a cautious kind of relief.

“Okay.”

—

Soft, tentative music stops Pomni in her tracks.

It’s almost dusk, that time of day where the sky goes pink and the clouds blot over the majority of it, and there’s music coming from the garage.

It’s the small, hesitant beginnings of a song. Chords carefully brushed against a guitar. Pomni knows what it is, she saw the look on Jax’s face when he saw the old thing sagged lonely in the corner.

It seemed to belong to Kinger, had to have been re-strung at least twice with a sticker of a beetle on the base. Pomni had only gotten a brief glance of the garage before Jax shut them all out and practically fortified the entrance. Plus, there was always that part of her that thought it could be boobytrapped. Bucket of water, dumbbell rigged up above, et cetera. Though cartoon logic no longer replied and if he did that, the consequence wouldn’t just be a bump on the head. And plus, she’d like to believe he’s above that now.

Despite it, she feels herself approach the door, press her ear to it. A certain curiosity thrums in her chest like a trapped hummingbird.

Sounding more clear, the light strumming persists, Jax’s voice audible, cursing softly when a wry chord goes wrong. Until he switches to a different song, seemingly easier, which Pomni immediately recognises as Strawberry Fields Forever when Jax starts mumbling the Spanish version of the lyrics under his breath. Which both surprises her and doesn’t. He’d never been afraid to sing before but it wasn’t like he did much. Only really the one time.

Until a small idea pops into her head. A risky one.

For days after her conversation with Ragatha Pomni had been trying to figure out ways to reach out, to catch the slippery eel that he was and keep him still. Unwilling to let him avoid the problem anymore, whatever it was. Sick of seeing him dodge and deflect and deny. And this could be her opening. Singing together helped bring them closer before, right?

As Jax messes up again, groans angrily and then starts over from the beginning, Pomni gently pushes the handle down and slips in as quiet as she can, miraculously avoiding being spotted.

Jax sits on the edge of his mattress partly turned away from her, hunched over the guitar on his lap.

Then, he starts the lyrics over again, singing listlessly, “Déjame llevarte hacia donde voy. Strawberry fields.”

As his voice fills the room, Pomni stands there, hands clammy, words caught in her throat, unsure of how to announce herself. As if this is her only chance to reach back out, Pomni almost braces herself.

“Nada es real. Y nada en lo que pensar,” Jax sings, strumming chords. “Strawberry fields forever.”

Now.

“Living is easy with eyes closed.” Shakily and still with doubts, Pomni opens her mouth and sings back, “Misunderstanding all you see.”

Jax whips around, a bewildered expression on his face. The music stops, world pauses, and for a moment both of them don’t know what’s going on.

Pomni takes a deciding breath, “It’s getting hard to be someone—“

“—but it all works out,” and Jax catches on quickly, a smile wriggling out of him as he joins onto her verse. And as Jax begins playing again, together they gingerly sing, “It doesn’t matter much to me.”

“Let me take you down—“ Pomni defaults to English as Jax carries on like he was. “—hacia donde voy.”

And she walks closer. “Strawberry fields.”

And they sit down together on the mattress there. “Nada es real.”

Jax’s hands move smoother around the strings now, “Y nada en lo que pensar.” His shoulders relax as he sings, his smile broadening. He loosens still, accepting the surprise, maybe welcoming it? “Strawberry fields forever.”

They continue to sing like that, swaying to the music on an old mattress in the garage, engulfed in the moment. And something changes there, small but significant enough to make Pomni realise that it’s happened. It isn’t quite right yet, defences still stacked high and impossibly thick but she finally feels like maybe there’s a chance now they can link hands through the fence.

As time goes by Jax seems to ease, sway more, let the music change him. Relaxed, he now unwittingly peers over his shield. Pomni follows suit except she, in turn, lowers her sword. It’s easy, it’s inevitable. But it won’t last forever.

As the song comes to a close, Jax makes a show of strumming the last chord obnoxiously and then laughing after, he and Pomni drawing out their last syllable together, once again in harmony.

“Haha, you’re good,” Jax says, setting the instrument down next to him and stretching. “Lured right in by my siren song, I’m guessing?”

“Mm, I thought you could use my help,” Pomni shoots back. “What would you do without me?”

Jax stifles another laugh, “Sure, Pom Pom. I was in such desperate need.”

“You kept messing up!” Pomni says. “I heard you. The walls aren’t as thick as you’d like to believe.”

Jax rolls his eyes, “Whatever you say.”

“How long have you been playing anyway? That sounded good.”

There’s the tiniest of flickers in his eyes, muffled hesitation. But every time it’s becoming smothered faster and faster. "Two years. More or less. Only hobby I really stuck with.” Next he shrugs. “Pretty rusty now though.”

Pomni smiles. “Interesting.”

Without warning, the door to the garage swings open and Kinger pops his head in. He’s got an amped up look on his face and smiles as he sees them. “We’re having a fire out in the backyard. Or, we’re about to. You two should join us!”

“Wasn’t it super overgrown last we checked?” asks Pomni after a short pause.

“Not anymore!” Kinger declares “Zooble and I finally finished clearing it out.”

Jax then makes a move towards the door, “So that’s what you’ve been doing all week.” Pomni follows.

Making their way across the room, they exit the garage and head towards the back door once obscured by boxes and cobwebs. Now it’s a reasonably decent entryway which opens its mouth to the outside. Zooble, Ragatha and Gangle all sit outside on rusty garden chairs and wave in greeting.

The air is crisper and birds can be heard softly chirping. What they found to be once a jungle of brambles and poison ivy crawling with bugs is now an adequately trimmed garden with worn step-stones visible amongst the grass. There’s a swarm of upright shrubs growing against the side of a shed tucked into the corner, a garden hose looking a bit worse for ware and a fire pit sitting on the patio. While it does look like they may have had to excavate it from a quarry, it would still do the job.

“Nice,” Jax murmurs under his breath. Kinger and Zooble share a triumphant look.

“You guys really turned this place around,” Pomni says, grinning.

“A fire, huh? Guess I can’t throw in Gangle’s scarf as kindling,” Jax laments, dejectedly kicking a stray rock to hit the metal underbelly of the fire pit.

“No!” Gangle and Zooble say in unison, Zooble adding afterwards a, “we could always toss in your wallet though.”

Jax narrows his eyes and clutches his pocket defensively. “You leave my cash alone.”

Somewhere between that budding argument, Kinger has wandered off to the stack of firewood he unearthed from ivy next to the shed. He’s then heard squealing in delight at all the spiders. Ragatha grimaces, standing up from her seat. “I’d better make sure he’s alright and won’t get distracted.”

As soon as she walks away, Jax promptly steals her chair and says in her direction (a bit louder than necessary), “Better hope there aren’t any centipedes in there, Raggy!”

Ragatha immediately freezes and hisses back, “Dont speak it into existence!”

Pomni extracts two other missing chairs that sit abandoned by the door to go with the four already there circling the fire pit. She sits down next to Jax (who is laughing obnoxiously) and watches Ragatha attempt to gingerly coax Kinger away from his fifty new friend requests.

It’s quiet for the first time in a while. Not just the actual noise but the noises in their heads seem to have died down slightly.

Kinger builds the start of a fire. It takes a little while to get started but once they get consistent match strikes and firelighters from a corner in the shed things roll smoothly. A small ball of embers flickering in the bottom of an empty pool.

Dusk starts to graze the tops of the sky, not a dome like the circus’ sky was, real and vast and endless. No cut-out clouds clump around the corners, the only thing alive the liquid colour. It steadily darkens, a constant as conversation hesitantly blooms under its fading light.

Soon enough, just at the perfect time, talking doesn’t feel like a mistake or a rock Pomni has to swallow. The sky is navy and the pinpricks of stars are starting to bud. And the fire rumbles steady and calm in the centre. Someone starts playing songs, Mac DeMarco’s Preoccupied, and when Zooble produces a box of ciders they brought home from work things start to pass easier.

Kinger is still giggling from a long forgotten remark as Pomni lazily nurses what’s left of her can.

“Here’s one,” he begins. “Did anyone have an embarrassing highschool nickname?”

Upon amused murmurs from the rest of the circle, Ragatha finally sighs and opens her mouth. “I used to get called, uh… park ranger.”

Jax breathes a laugh. “Why’s that?”

“Someone caught me feeding squirrels once,” Rags explains. “And I occasionally just happened to wear riding boots to school one too many times. I was just trying to be nice! Nobody seemed to let it go.”

As Jax predictably laughs, Pomni speaks up. “My friends called me Jailtime sometimes.”

Zooble raises an eyebrow. “What’s the story behind that one?”

“Everybody said I’d get arrested for breaking into all those abandoned buildings.” Pomni sighs. “I did it even as a teenager. It also sounds a bit like my name. Apparently. I don’t really get it.”

Jax near cackles, “What’s your name then? No spine?”

Pomni scoffs, narrows her eyes, “I’ll show you ‘no spine.’ You’re making fun of everybody’s nicknames. What was yours?”

As Jax’s laughter dies down he sighs contently. “Hot tamale. I don’t think there was a reason.” He shrugs. “Kinda racist but I liked it.”

Some laughs are shared at that. “What about you, Zooble?” Ragatha asks.

Quietly, Jax sings, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious—”

Zooble glares at him. “Not. That. I didn’t really do anything noteworthy or crazy to earn a real nickname. Most of my friends didn’t either. My name isn’t really nickname-ifyable anyway.”

Gangle sighs in tandem. “Take your pick. I got called a lot of names in school.” She then turns to Kinger. “What about you?”

“Oh! It’s so obvious. Guess.”

After a moment, Ragatha suggests, “Bug boy?”

Kinger waves her off, “No, no. Queenie was the one who loved bugs. She was an entomologist after all. I loved them for her. Try again.”

Pomni then offers, “Uh, it’s a bit basic but, Nerd? You did do compsci.”

“Nope,” Kinger smiles. “At least I hope not. Guess again.” Upon being met with mystified silence, Kinger laughs in disbelief. “Really? It’s right in front of you!”

Jax grins. “Uhhh, JavaScript?”

“Nope.”

“Four-eyes?” Gangle proposes.

“Nope.”

Zooble sighs. “Cmon, Kinger. Just tell us what it is.”

“Alright, alright,” he relents. “I’ll tell you.”

Anticipatory stares land on Kinger, taking a big breath and then clearing his throat to announce: “Whitlocks.”

“…what?” says Jax eventually.

“Kinger, how were we ever supposed to guess that?” Zooble asks, incredulous.

“Well, like I said, it’s right in front of you.”

Zooble sighs. “What does that mean?”

Kinger just blinks, gesturing to his chest. “It’s on my shirt.” Sure enough, ‘Whitlocks’ is printed in big, bold letters. Zooble stares, mouth agape.

“Wait,” Jax interrupts. “That sounds like a place name.”

“A road actually.” Kinger clarifies, still smiling. “It was on a sign that I stole.”

Zooble gives Kinger a bewildered, career ruining side-eye. “And you put it on a shirt?!”

Kinger simply nods. “Whitlocks was a very long-running joke. This was a gift!”

Jax is now in the same pool of disbelief as Zooble. “Wow. I genuinely never would’ve expected that. So, life of crime, eh?”

“It was a dare,” he says. “Though I did go through a sort of rebellious phase. Didn’t steal much after that honestly.”

Jax nods. “Ahhh. I stole tons when I was a kid. Never got caught.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Asks Ragatha exasperatedly.

“Naturally.” Jax smiles, clearly proud of himself. “And of course we can’t forget about crime mafioso Pomni!”

“Shut up,” she laughs.

“Multiple counts of breaking and entering, filming without permission.” Jax counts up her supposed felonies on his fingers. “Did you ever get caught?”

Pomni shrugs. “No but I came close a couple of times. Lots of cops with nothing better to do.”

“With a nickname like Jailtime I would actually hope you didn’t live up to it. Although it would be pretty funny to imagine how you’d fare in jail,” Jax replies. “What about you Zoobie? Any crimes?”

For a moment, Zooble weighs whether to disclose that information. “I used to do a lot of graffiti.”

“Ahhh. A vandal. Classic.”

“I guess.” They shrug. “Used to do it around my neighbourhood, targeted this one house. They were dickheads, put one of those high frequency teenager alarms in their front yard. I hated those pompous, bigoted assholes.”

Suddenly, in a rare beat of silence, Gangle whispers, “So cool…”

Zooble then smiles, a subtle glint in their eyes. “Thanks Gangle.”

She then blushes. “U-uh, you’re welcome!”

They go on discussing crimes from there, back and forth, which turns into a long and elaborate story from Ragatha about her Aunt’s entrepreneurship, tax evasion and custody battle. It’s surprisingly gripping, unlike most people’s family drama. Pomni finds herself on the edge of her seat amongst everyone else. This sends Jax and Zooble off into stories about their equally insane family, minor offences with the law, big blowout fights, awkward cookouts.

She thinks of how this could never happen in the circus. It was all too plastic, too fake to even graze what this felt like. It was hard to just look at each other without their eyes hurting from the blue light. Without remembering all over again that they were trapped and this was their only solace. Except they don’t have to know that anymore. Even if life right now is all shades of weird.

And part of her is comfortable here. For once her hands lie still in her lap or holding a can. And it might be the alcohol, might be the warmth of the fire, might be the fact she’s getting sleepy. But it’s still happening.

And somethings happening in the chair next to her.

Through laughter, Jax flowers into the chatterbox he’s always been. No longer is the forced, guarded persona he was wearing for weeks. Free and unraveled, something has cracked, spilled into open air. The breeze is cleaner and Jax looks the most content he has in weeks. Pomni can’t fight a smile. She doesn’t know what it is, but at least something is working.

—

The night after the fire, Pomni underestimates how much she actually drank and wakes up with a light headache, makes her way down the stairs and sees everyone is up except for Jax, Kinger and Zooble. After most had gone to bed, the three had stayed with the fire until it had long burned out and talked for hours until about midnight. They’d all slept like rocks after that, probably even now.

She says her good-mornings, makes coffee, drinks the coffee, sits next to everyone on the couch and zones out entirely for a moment. One by one the stragglers of the night trickle down the stairs, half-asleep and hung over, ready to never look at a cider again. Except for Jax. Always an outlier.

Later is when he decides to make an appearance. He saunters down the stairs with, strangely, freshly dyed hair at about three in the afternoon. He clearly notices everybody staring and seems to revel in the attention despite nobody actually saying anything. It’s a deep indigo this time, completely upending the bright and saturated purple and teal he had before. It’s enough to look black in some lights, almost his natural colour, just something’s not quite right. It suits him in the way that a shirt too small would. Only if you looked too closely, perhaps one too many times, you’d see that the lighter purple was better before it was drowned.

He looks a little odd now but it’s just something to get used to. Pomni keeps telling herself that anyway, only every time she looks, with subdued horror, she notices something new. A stain of dye on his neck, a choppily cut strand here or there, evidence that he isn’t as put together as he’s trying to be. There’s no easy way to ignore cracks in a mirror, and Jax wears a smile like one almost the entire time he’s around her.

It really would be nothing, this calculated stillness, plastic smile on his face, scripted jokes and insults—just his entire demeanour has changed, guard held as high and firm as when she met him. He gets meaner as the day continues, completely ignoring Zooble as they leave for work and try to say goodbye.

It’s like he’s unsure what piece of his personality he’s putting forward, which persona to use, critiquing his performance internally every time he gets a weird look.

Eventually he devolves into this grey sort of indifference, snapping at anyone who tries to talk to him, ebbing away into a husk not often seen when it’s wrapped entirely with its tourniquets. One by one, everybody decides to draw their attention somewhere else, leave him to sulk about whatever it is he’s sulking about. Still with the same automatic, counterfeit smile. But Pomni keeps her eye on him, unwavering. He doesn’t even notice.

There’s this look on his face in silent moments he thinks nobody’s watching. Looking but not seeing, a shell with no innards, something Pomni’s now trained herself to recognise. Just quiet, distant, letting the world fast forward while he stays on pause.

The haunting realisation dawns on her that all of that all of that perceived progress last night was shattered in an instant. There is no apparent cause, no hints, no nothing. Only that the most natural, unafraid version of him was swallowed up in a single, easy instant. Like somebody had pulled out the wires in his brain and he’d reverted to his factory settings.

Helpless to do anything, Pomni once again reserves herself to try and come up with a way to ask about it. Once her shock wears off that is. It isn’t clear whether Ragatha noticed the same thing but her attempts at a Knowing Look seem to fall on deaf ears.

As the night progresses and Gangle slinks into the kitchen for her night to cook, Pomni gradually stews as she finishes what’s left of the chore chart. She angrily folds laundry.

It isn’t over even though he definitely wants it to be. He will not slip through her grasp. Pomni thumbs the fabric of one of his shirts before sighing heavily and tossing it into the pile of his other washed clothes. Where does he get off making this so hard? She’ll just have to keep grumbling nonsense until she finds that out.

Dyeing his hair is one thing but the sudden switch-up was intense, even for him. It’s whiplash. It’s irritating.

She doesn’t want to be angry with him, doesn’t want to make this a fight since the end goal is to alleviate some of the stress he’s clearly under. It’s just so hard not to be when he insists on making it as hard as possible to figure out what he’s thinking. All that’s left after her understanding melts away is smouldering frustration.

Pomni is suddenly interrupted by something crumpling in the pocket of one of Jax’s jeans, the ones he was wearing yesterday. The smell of smoke must’ve deemed them wash-worthy. Pomni slowly, almost hesitantly (as if something was going to jump out at her), reaches into the front pocket and pulls out a damp, crumpled bus ticket. She discards the trousers into the pile and nosily decides to read it.

It’s just an ordinary bus ticket except for the odd time it was purchased. Inconspicuously, the time is printed at the bottom as just after midnight. One of the night busses. And the date was… the day before the fire. Huh.

For a moment, Pomni holds it tight, half expecting some kind of giant epiphany to flood over her. But waiting proves fruitless. Frustration bubbles up within her and she sighs shortly. One shred that proves nothing festering in her hands. Yet another push that only yields dead ends.

She turns it over on a whim and sees hasty writing on the back—her heart then leaps into her throat as she scans over the pen, almost wishing it’s something terrible, some evidence she can use to prove why she’s concerned. Because the only way he’ll listen is by having the proof shoved in his face. Her eyes jut hard into his jagged handwriting, block capitals, no nonsense. No time for mistakes.

‘Z & K’

She turns it over once, twice, three times, trying to dig for whatever thoughts were embedded under the ink. And. That’s it? That can’t be all there is.

Theres a crystal clear thought in the back of her mind. A thought that whispers gravely about all of the times he’s left in the middle of the night, all the days he’s spent toying with their guesses of what he’s been doing with his life. All of those ‘unknowns.’

He hadn’t got a job, he hadn’t got a hobby. He hadn’t even tried to see his parents, his previous friends (if he had any). Time stills as Pomni slowly stores the ticket in her pocket. She’ll decide what to do with it later.

Guiltily, Pomni’s mind instantly darts to horrible things, things she doesn’t want to imagine Jax doing—drugs, seedy bars, dangerous people and situations. They make her stomach churn with sickened worry. For a moment she just stands there, turning weak ideas over in her head. Staggering upon the possibility that what he could need might be soaring above her pay grade.

Still, even if that was true, every part of her ached to try anyway.

So after she finishes laundry she keeps a closer eye on him, laser focused in, which proves to work out more conveniently than she anticipated; he’s hardly capable of paying much attention.

It’s like he’s trapped in his mind, barriers of sound and light blocked where his eyes and mouth and nose should be. It’s quiet outside but in there Pomni can sense a rampaging hurricane, frigid and blinding, set to tear open every part of Jax’s innards before it ever saw the dawn. And it would. That is, if something didn’t quell it soon.

He crumbled so quickly, it’s frightening. An icy trickle dribbles down her spine every time she looks for too long. And soon enough it’s dinner time, Gangle clumsily plating spaghetti for each place at the table. Jax’s seat was empty far longer than it should’ve been. He came eventually, though not without the avoidance of eye contact and eerie blankness which had silently infected him since they had escaped. Perhaps even before then.

After dinner, late into the night, far after Pomni decided whilst staring wide-eyed at the ceiling that she was definitely going to sleep, she concedes. Sitting up, quietly exiting the room and tiptoeing around a snoring Ragatha, Pomni makes her way into the hallway.

She doesn’t know where she’s going, just that she has cotton mouth without any of the other benefits of weed. Water is the mission. The only taps are on the first floor; she approaches the stairs.

Not wanting to wake anybody up (especially Gangle who wakes up if you breathe wrong around her) and aware that the stairs are creaky, Pomni descends with caution.

Until movement downstairs stops her in her tracks.

It could be anyone, Zooble coming home early, Kinger dozing off to the news and snoring with the ferocity of a chainsaw.

Or him.

She can’t win the war of assumptions, imagining all of the scenarios all over again, what shady behaviour Jax could be up to at midnight. She doesn’t want to believe the worst of him but it’s steadily looking like a big possibility. Pomni avoids the creaks as much as possible, quickly descending.

Really, he could just be getting up to get some water. Something normal. Just like her. But part of her doesn’t believe that and that’s the part that’s in the drivers seat.

Feet finally hitting the floor, Pomni pokes her head past the wall encasing the staircase and the room is completely empty. Soft light coming from under the garage door, silence hangs in the air like stale dust. Pomni sighs softly, walking into the kitchen. Relief is mixed with a sour sort of disappointment, mingling like oily water together in her chest.

Before she can even run the tap under the glass she took from the upper cabinet, the shift of a door handle stops her in her tracks. She freezes mid step.

Jax steps slowly out across the room, directly in her line of sight, except he doesn’t see her. Eyes glued to the floor and moving quickly yet clunkily, he crouches down near the wall of the stairs and opens the wine cupboard. She can’t see him well in the dark but she knows theft of alcohol when she sees it. He grabs what looks to be a bottle of vodka.

It reminds her chillingly of when she was a young teenager, dipping into the kitchen late at night and sneaking some liquor from the very top shelf. He stands up with a short exhale, takes a massive swig and then replaces it, closing the cupboard and  turning to walk towards the front door. He moves with the same shifted balance he did the night of his panic attack and Pomni can’t help but feel her stomach flip at that. His eyes catch the faintest glint of moonlight from a window, glassy and void, the warm brown of them looks black in this darkness.

Staying as still as possible Pomni almost feels as if she’s watching this happen through a screen, muted and trapped by the narrative unfolding before her, banging on the glass as he steps towards the door.

He walks with heavy footsteps to the coat rack, slips on some shoes and, to Pomni’s abject horror, grabs her coat. It doesn’t look purposeful as he slips it on, the mistake going completely unnoticed in his haze. Jax then makes his way to the front door, grabs his keys and exits the house with impressive silence.

As soon as the door shuts, Pomni lets out this massive breath that was trapped in the back of her throat, this kind of sick sinking feeling rolling around in her chest like a metal ball. All of her words seem to be sewn to her tongue, so carefully she approaches the front door just as he did. In a moment of stillness following Jax’s haunted, clumsy exit, Pomni is faced with two choices that she has minutes to make lest he goes too far, she loses him in the empty night and the decision is made for her—Go back to bed and trust he’ll come back in one piece?

Or chase her instinct and go rabbit hunting.

It’s obvious which she chooses; she wants her coat back after all.

With a decisive push, Pomni puts on her shoes and then, upon having no coat to take, she chooses Jax’s one just for some consistency. Then with one final look to the house, Pomni swipes her keys and makes it hastily out of the door.

She’s just fast enough locking up that she can still see him making his way down the street. The outside air is far colder than in the house, the frigid breeze biting her fingertips and nose. Pomni exhales briefly to see her breath hang in the air before pressing onwards when she sees that Jax has almost made it to the end of the street.

Kinger’s house is on an incline, so she can see all the way down the string of houses to where the street joins to another one. Jax is visible still as Pomni trails loosely behind him, he chooses to go right, further towards the city. To the left is just more houses. He blends in out here, the only place he can. Usually she’d look for a shock of purple in the ocean of blackness between streetlights but has to keep reminding herself that it’s gone now.

The cold isn’t bothering her as much as she expected. It’s chilled her hands and face but other than that she doesn’t feel it. Turning right only a couple of minutes after Jax’s long stride, she gets a chance to gingerly admire the night, breathe in the frosty air.

His coat is the culprit of her regulated temperature. It’s thick, warm, one of those that have fleece inside and that border on restricting. She could only recognise it in the dark of the house because it has a patch crudely sewn onto the right bicep. It’s of a small logo in black and white, somewhat resembling a dragon. It had caught her eye when he brought it home from getting back what little stuff his old landlord had saved.

It was just a box of things, kept out of pity, though this coat seemed to be the only thing that ever left it, the box sitting in the corner of the garage with his old name scrawled over it with permanent marker. Pomni never got a look before Jax had scribbled it out.

He makes his way through some side alleys, crosses roads until he gets to a bus stop. There are two busses that stop here, she can see on the sign that one goes into the city and one goes to the train station. She can’t get too close to him of course, unwilling to be spotted when she hasn’t gotten sufficient info.

I shouldn’t be doing this, echoes in Pomni’s mind. She suddenly feels very creepy, watching from a distance and trying to see Jax’s face past his inky hair. She really should turn back around and forget this, forget the insatiable urge to dig deeper than anybody dare dive. Though the ball of sparks in her stomach whirls around at the thought of turning her back on this.

She wonders if this was how Ragatha felt, this calling, this overwhelming sense of obligation. Almost fascination. But most of all, in the soup mess spattering the wall is worry. Thin, oily, sallow worry, seeping down into her heart.

This skittish anxiety still bangs on the walls of her mind, energy pulsing through her like adrenaline, like she’s drank too much coffee. She knows she’s in over her head, knows this is not her depth and that she cannot do it on her own. Still she lurks in the shadows, an outsider to the lonely spotlight cast over him at that stop. This flightless bird desperately hurling itself off of a cliffside.

A bus arrives, sagging to a stop at the curb with a sigh. Pomni slowly approaches as Jax disappears into the glowing inside. She reaches the doors just as the driver moves to close them. He stops and nods her in. Pomni steps up, pays and as she turns to assess the seats and sees that Jax has fled to the very back. Pomni sits as far forward as possible and pulls her hood up, hoping that the few patrons between them will shield her from view.

She can feel phantom eyes on the back of her head, much like that first day back here, acclimatised to ice cold reality. Every stop she anticipates getting up, seeing her own coat back slip past her in the aisle and disappearing into the night where she can only trail behind with fascinated horror swarming her head like flies.

But in the end it takes a long time until Jax decides to get off. Every other rider had cleared off long before, only leaving them sitting apart with only the rumble of tires against tarmac to fill the silence. She almost misses him walking past, scrambling to stand and follow as he’s swallowed by the darkness. She even forgets to thank the bus driver, thinking not to expose her voice in case he hears.

She lets him walk to create some distance, feeling like she’s over-strategising a bit. There’s a long stretch of time where she trails after him through back roads and neighbourhoods and passageways leading somewhere else. Past shops and closed down business ventures long abandoned. Pomni silently thanks whatever divine force is up there that Jax is a man. She wouldn’t get anywhere if he had the awareness and fear that she and every other woman needed walking alone at night.

It’s not long before he’s seemingly reached his destination; an abandoned building site. Which takes her by some surprise. This is the type of place she would visit late at night to film back when she still did that. He approaches, shoes kicking up dust and rocks, fists clenched. But before any awful ideas can come rushing through her head, he huffs louder than necessary.

Slowly, Jax turns around, appearing annoying but unreadable behind that. “Are you kidding me, Pomni?!”

Stunned, her breath catches in her throat as she reluctantly lets her hood down and walks towards him. Pomni stammers at first, all words escaping her. What do you even say in this situation? ‘Hi, I was following you cause I think you’re doing drugs or something’? She was never going to engage, at least not plausibly. There was always the big red button of confrontation in her mind, just that Jax chose to detonate it first.

“Are you seriously following me like a private fucking investigator?!” This is the first time to date that Jax had been the one to instigate. Usually he kept relatively cool, downplaying and not taking anything seriously. Up to at certain point at least. “Did you need to chase me all the way here? Couldn’t you have waited until breakfast to inquire about my shadiness?”

Finally, Pomni manages a, “I was just… I wanted—“

“I don’t give one what you want!” Jax laughs, the sound verging on the edge of a clearing of the throat. “Why the hell are you out here?!”

All she can muster up is something quieter than the creak of a door. “You took my coat.”

Jax appears momentarily confused until he spies the patch on his jacket’s arm. On her. He scoffs. “I see how it is then.”

“Look,” Pomni sighs, more out of stress than annoyance. “You were the one teasing all of your ‘unknowns.’ You really didn’t think someone would try to find out what you’re doing?”

“But it’s you!” Jax snaps. “It’s always you! Singing with me, coming into my room, talking, laughing, following me in the dead of fucking night. Why?” As he speaks he paces loosely in a circle. This is the most Pomni’s ever heard him curse. Her shoulders tighten. “What’s your game?”

“I just wanted to make sure you weren’t…” Pomni trails off, at a loss. Insinuating he’s been doing something awful feels as inevitable as her next breath. “I don’t want you to spiral, Jax.”

“Spiral?” He scoffs. “I’m not spiralling. No, I’m not spiralling, what a batshit assumption. You’re the one fucking spiralling. And you chase me down in the middle of the night to try and prove it?”

“Well what are you doing then? Please tell me.”

“Not that I owe you anything but I’ve been taking walks in the city. To clear my head, I guess? I don’t know. I don’t come here, I just thought that you’d be more comfortable on your home turf,” Jax says, gesturing to the abandoned building. He then adds quietly, “Walking’s easier than sleeping anyway.”

Yeah, walks where you work yourself up and think your mind in circles, Pomni aches to say. But she keeps her mouth shut. She knows better than that. Instead she takes a few cautious steps forward, disinclined to let this become a fight. “Jax.”

“What?! What do you want?!” Jax stammers with disbelief, backing away every time she advances. “A confession or something? Fine, I’ve been running a secret drug ring under your noses. Are you happy now? Will you cut this out and leave me alone?”

Pomni lowers her head whilst keeping her eyes focused on him, earnestly speaking. “All I need to know is that you’re okay.”

“Fuck that, you don’t need to know shit.” Jax near growls, voice darkening. “Get away from me.”

Pomni frowns, feeling the cold of the night slice through her need to get closer, a slash of reality touch her face as her icy fingertips graze her cheek in trying to brush some hair away. Reluctantly she backs away, still keeping him in arms length just in case. “Okay.” Her voice sounds hollow in this air. The slower she backs off with her hands surrendered, the more it looks almost like she’s being held at gunpoint.

Just in case of what?

“Maybe I don’t, but I want to.”

“Why? What do you care?” Jax huffs, screwing the unzipped ends of her coat up where they lie near his hands. “All you seem to want to do is pester me and be a huge bother. And chase after stupid, petty things like your dumb coat.”

Pomni interjects, “This isn’t about that—“

“So ‘not about that’ that it’s the one reason you could find for following me that didn’t sound insane.” He again laughs. “What are you even doing here? Did you think this would achieve something?”

“Well, it clearly won’t. I see that now.” Pomni says slowly.

“Wild man.” Jax rolls his eyes and clenches his fist so hard Pomni suspects his nails break the skin on his palms. “Wild! I can’t believe this, I’m actually being psychoanalysed right now.”

All of her calmness is sucked out of her, drained out and evaporated. That’s it. That’s it. Pomni’s head suddenly starts to bubble with rage, blistering her heart, words swarming in her throat. “You are making this so difficult!”

Jax then freezes, wide eyes almost glowing in the moon light, oceans of blackness staring at her.

“Why, when anybody tries to help you, do you just shut them out? Why do you hate it so much when I reach out to you?” For a moment Pomni is left breathless, like the words were punched out of her. Faced with the situation, Jax staring like a deer in headlights at her, Pomni’s stomach flips. Their surroundings get all wobbly and mush up like a muddy puddle and suddenly speaking feels like forcing a lemon through a drain. “What is wrong right now? I feel like I’m missing something.”

He narrows his eyes, a faint, incredulous smile ghosting his lips. Pomni’s icy breath wafts over her own. “Wow. You’ve been talking to Ragatha about me.”

Something suddenly changes in Jax. The anger dribbles away, if only for a split second; gone are the blinded accusations and insults; gone is the burdened hunch in his shoulders and the iron clamps of his hands.

All that’s left is a hollow shell of Jax. As if the gust of wind that just hit her back took all that he was, all he felt and all that she knew of him and whisked it away, carried on by the breeze like dandelion seeds drifting, finding refuge somewhere else.

It’s chilling. His face darkens, shoulders relax, and she swears it’s only for that still moment in time. Where her anger seems to heat her insides and where all is quiet, it’s only then that it feels that way. All of his words until that point were filled with acid colour and bitter, dizzyingly magnified rage. But with that sentence it all seemed to chip away. Paint off of a dresser, stagnant and cold as the abandoned furniture and rubble that surrounds them.

Pomni swallows her fears. She swallows every doubt she could have, every tiny notion that she’s shaken by him. “How did you know that?”

It’s that same feeling she got before, in the circus. That same dilated, glazed over look he gave her. That same sensation that she was not looking at a person so much as a statue moulded into the dirt, shrouded in the skin of who it was supposed to resemble. And it only lasts a second. And that might be the worst part.

“I ‘shut everyone out.’ I’ve known Dollface for years, I know how she talks. I thought that wording was clear enough but,” he smiles, ice lining his teeth, “thanks for confirming.” Jax then raises his eyebrows at her, a silent nod accompanying that and the faint smile he still wears. He breathes a laugh after, like it’s funny. Something about it ticks a nerve in her, that blasé attitude. She blinks hard.

“Fine, you got me.” Pomni throws out her hands. “And honestly, I don’t care if you mind. I needed answers and I was never gonna get them from you. And Ragatha knows things. She’s been with you a while.”

“What the fuck made you feel like you ‘needed’ any answers about my life?” Something in Jax snaps, his voice darkening once again as he thumps a finger against his chest and then jabs an accusatory one at her. “What horse do you have in this race? Wh-What makes you think you’re entitled to that shit?!”

Pomni staggers a bit at the sudden switch in tone but stands her ground, if not for the guilt suddenly creeping in at the edges. “We’re friends. If you’re not gonna take care of yourself, I guess I’m gonna do it for you. Until you can, that is.”

Jax barks a laugh. “I’m fine on my own.”

“What is with this stupid lone-wolf bullshit?” Pomni pinches the bridge of her nose, sighing. “I can’t—ugh. I can’t do this if you’re gonna be an idiot.”

“Well you clearly should be able to,” Jax laughs with heavy indignation, “you came here! You got yourself into this mess, deal with it. You and Ragatha! You know what she did to me the other day, I assume after your little pow-wow? She took my fucking phone! She can’t open it so I know it’s just some inane scheme to bait me into talking to her! Why do you both feel the need to harass me about my feelings?!”

Pomni feels her eyes wetting against her will. She shoves her hands in Jax’s coat pockets, feeling around and eventually discovering a stray button.

Upon getting no response, Jax takes this as an invitation to continue his rant. “I don’t care if you think I’m in idiot, I don’t care if you think I’m some soppy loner who lost everything in his life and won’t do anything about it. I don’t care what you think of me, and I don’t care what you’re going to do. You want my sad backstory? You want to know everything that happened to me in the circus—everything that happened back then just so you can justify your image of me in your head?—Fuck that. I don’t owe you anything and I definitely don’t owe you this.”

Pomni’s throat goes dry. “What do you mean, everything ‘back then?’”

“Wh—but you…” Jax blinks, appearing confused over anything else all of a sudden. “How much did…?” And his emotions flip again, as though they’re on a cycle through a slot machine’s wheel. Something in his eyes scratches away the glazed top layer and reveals the horror below. He breaks their line of sight, gaze drooping to the floor, almost talking to himself now. In a near whisper, he murmurs, “Shit, she doesn’t…”

Pomni braves another ask while he’s still distracted. “Did something happen before the circus?”

Jax’s eyes snap back on her, laser focused. He heaves out a breath like the air in his lungs is heavy. “Shut up.”

“What—?”

“Shut UP!” Upon that, Jax boots a stray rock on the ground, sending it flying into a fence.

Pomni swallows again. And again. Something needs to escape her, like a wild animal scrabbling in her stomach. A desperate needle in her throat. A sudden burst of courage overwhelms her, the feeling uncontrollable. It’s only a small, brittle word, but it goes hurtling into the world anyway at the speed of a freight train. Pomni’s mouth goes dry as she utters it in a final attempt to reach him past the anger.

“Felix…”

A startled breath escapes Jax before he can clamp his mouth shut. The look on his face is of utter betrayal scrawled all over, the sight of which sends Pomni into a panic. She’s done it now.

His name. His legal name, his real name. The one she took shameful note of on his driver’s license, the one scribbled over on the boxes, the one tethered to his previous life. His eyes widen at the edges, taking an unsteady step back. For a second the world goes quiet. Only for a second, though.

All of the shock disappears from his face at once, replaced with a frightened sort of rage. Even Pomni can’t believe what she’s done despite all the risks and she’s positive it shows.

Jax begins to wrestle her coat off of him, and with a winding right-hook, coat bunched in his hand, he roars a, “Don’t FUCKING CALL ME THAT!”

Despite its light weight, her coat comes hurtling at her and hits her in the chest, knocking her wind out only due to shock. The end of the zip hits her in the face and she groans, the thing falling onto the ground into a crumpled heap of blackness.

Pomni shrinks where she is, rubbing at her cheek where a red mark is promising to make a sparkling appearance tomorrow. It’s definitely a mistake (especially after all of that) but she braves a look up at him once her heart stops thumping against her ribs.

Jax’s chest heaves, panting, eyes wild. That same swirling fear that seemed to consume him in the kitchen. The arm that threw the coat hands limply near his torso, hunched stance making him look even more unstable.

She can imagine a different outcome to this, where a tiny ‘Felix’ somehow snapped him out of his tranced rage, somehow lifted whatever spell Jax had been afflicted by and they’d go home on the bus together. Where he would realise all at once what had gone wrong, where instead of being provoked by it he was moved. And she’d study his face for emotion but none would show.

Pomni swallows several icy rocks lodged in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she stutters out before her nerve wilts. Jax says nothing but adjusts his stance and she’s once again plunged into reality every time she looks at him. Despite the blindsiding explosion, shock isn’t lasting as long as it maybe should. She should’ve expected something like this; he definitely isn’t stable enough to handle surprises like that. Jax then catches her eye by sighing.

But then, Pomni catches the most fleeting glance of it. And it turns her blood to icy slush.

He’s wearing a T-shirt which was previously concealed by her coat, and she couldn’t see it in the dark of the house but hit by the harsh white of the streetlights, everything is exposed. And it roots her to the ground right where she stands.

Desperate slashes into brown skin, smudged with flaking blood he never cared to clean. Angry rips tear through old white scars, caving open the tiny ravines that had long been healed. The glimpse is nothing short of that, a glimpse. It only lasts for a second but the image is something she will never forget, burned into her retinas, something she would see at night for weeks to come.

Pomni knew. She knew when she saw them on the train, those little white ghosts of slashes. She knew what had probably inflicted them (or who). She just didn’t want to say it, even in her head. But this was a complete 180, a whole new can of worms squirming around to match the other hundred that’ve been opened up tonight.

It feels hard to imagine the fire as yesterday. It feels more like a burning memory, glowing embers of its paper lining the hole through the centre. Pomni wills to shut her eyes and imagine that Jax. That Jax laughing, slouching and relaxed, cracking jokes and making conversation. Not highly strung, seething and afraid.

It takes everything in her not to make a sound, not to move. Not to cry. She’s positive the look on her face says it all but judging by his silence, Jax hasn’t noticed anything is amiss. Maybe her poker face is just as good as his. Or maybe he’s living in his cave of wilful, blissful ignorance. Like always. He opens his mouth again, Pomni ripping her eyes away from the sight to look at his face. It’s harder than before.

“I’m going back to the house,” he says simply, wearily, voice coarse and rough now it’s at a reasonable volume. It breaks her heart, hearing it crack and tremble, dip between a whisper and a low toned thrumming. “Come or don’t. I don’t care.”

Pomni doesn’t wait around as he passes her, dust and rocks clouding at his shoes. She easily merges to his side and together they walk, sort of dejectedly, to the bus stop they came from. It isn’t far but time seems to stretch endlessly as the pressing, pregnant silence envelops them.

It’s breathless, as if Pomni fell asleep and had woken up in space. Cold and alien. Suffocating in darkness, able to thrash but not to move.

The post finally comes into view, standing lonely under a streetlight, casting a long shadow which seems to crawl across the road right towards them.

They do go home on the bus together, that’s one thing from her wishful scenario came true. They wait standing far apart until the bus comes. Pomni checks the time and a minute seems to clunk by in five. And she was right at the end, that she’d look into his eyes from that distance and only see a barrier.

They go home to an empty house, past an awkward bus ride and a silent walk home, their breaths hanging in the chiller air. A 1:00AM house shrouded in darkness and shadows. They part ways downstairs, Jax turning to leave as soon as he’s in range of the door.

And as he does, Pomni stops and stares at him, magnetically drawn to something that could hurt her all over again.

He just looks up, simply. A flick of the eyes and a pause before he shuts the door and seals himself away.

It isn’t angry. It’s exhausted.