Chapter Text
“Nevermind.”
The lone word hung heavy between them as Jax turned around and slowly walked away, not sparing her a second glance. She’d seen Jax hang around the periphery of the group as they tried their best to manifest solutions to the myriad holes and errors that plagued the circus after Caine’s death, but every time she noticed he seemed more and more distant, both physically and mentally, and now, after this halfhearted, aborted attempt at reaching out for a reason she couldn’t possibly think of, there was a weight in her chest that she couldn’t explain.
She felt as if on a narrow path, where taking a single step in the wrong direction would plunge everything into horrors unending.
She felt her urge to give space, to accommodate and be patient urge at her to leave Jax alone, that he only needed time on his own and some measure of peace after the recent events to come back to the furry nuisance everyone knew him as, but she knew that this time it was different. This time, she felt, if she didn’t reach out, he’d be gone forever, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to forgive herself afterwards.
She didn’t realise when her legs had started to move at a hurried but quieted tempo, afraid of alerting Jax to her presence. She followed around corners as he took turn after turn through hidden nooks and crannies that she had never seen before. An olympic pool that had waves radiating from its center point, through an emergency door and into a mountain peak, through a crack in the rock and into an abandoned supermarket, and from one of the coolers and into an open stretch of flat road, a single streetlight illuminating a wooden bench with a soft, yellow glow.
Jax sat on the bench, face in his hands, completely motionless, and the sight clenched something in Pomni’s chest that she couldn’t dare to name. The distance, the avoidance, the utter lack of any banter the past few days, it all felt as if Jax’s facade had simply crumbled and now he was preparing himself to just… leave them. Pomni’s throat tightens, and she approaches him, taking a step into the light and to Jax’s left. Her eyes are planted firmly on him, and it is easy for her to read the sudden tension in his shoulders even if he doesn’t really look at her, his face still in his hands. She bites her lip, looking for the right words to say before Jax beats her to the punch.
“You shouldn’t be here,” it is said matter-of-factly, with a deliberately flat and featureless tone. Pomni doesn’t buy it for one second.
“And here I am anyway,” she says as she sits by his side. Not too far, not too close, just enough to signal that she’s here. She takes a look at the infinite road spanning horizon to horizon. A deep breath, a steeling of nerves. “What did you want to talk about?”
Jax tenses further, looking away from her. “None of your business.” It’s a deflect that’s mild at best, with no real heart in it, exhaustion lacing his words, and going by his wince, he knows it.
Pomni quietly hums before answering. “Didn’t seem like that to me.” She doesn’t say anything else, content with just offering her company and presence, at least for now.
Jax draws further into himself, brows scrunched into a grimace that’s half irritation and half something else. “None of your business, go away.”
Pomni gives him a mild glare, sitting still, folded hands over her lap. “No, I don’t think I will. You came to me first, reaching out and then pulling back after days of silence, and now you tell me that it’s none of my business? No, Jax. It doesn’t work like that. It never…” She feels a flare of anger that she balls into a fist and mercilessly crushes down, as she always does. A deep breath. “Talk to me man,” her eyes soften, “please.”
Something in Jax snaps without warning, she can see it in the way he suddenly stands up, shoulders tensed, breathing shallow and hitched, fists balled. “Why do you always have to do this? Why do you always have to make things so much harder than they need to be!? I don’t- you, you-!” He presses the palm of his hands against his eyelids, biting down a scream as Pomni stands up, hands by her sides and palms held out in front of her.
“Hey, Jax. Jax-”
“Don’t just- don’t Jax me! D- I-” He stammers over himself several times before screaming in frustration. “It’s you! It’s always you, you you you! Why won’t you ever leave me alone!? I hate you!” She takes a step towards him, hands still by her side, eyes on his own, and he violently flinches back, gaze filled with panic.
She’s flying back before she knows what’s happening, and then her head hits the streetlight and her vision goes black for a horrifying instant. When she comes to she has a raging headache and her vision is spotty and blurry at the edges, but more important to her is the figure of Jax’s huddled form down on his knees, looking at his hands as if they were serpents about to lunge at him and strangle him on the spot. “I, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to I didn’t want to- I-” His words devolve into incoherent stammers as tears gather on the corners of his eyes, pupils now less than pinpricks, flitting everywhere and settling nowhere.
Dread inches over Pomni as she a feeling of hopelessness permeates the air around them, and before she can get her brain to work her jaw and tongue into a coherent set of words, her attempts get stuck on her throat the moment she sees the blackness of abstraction spring forth from his hands and start to crawl down and into his arms. Pomni rushes towards him and he flinches back, gaze panicked and hurt. His hands flinch to the sides, getting them as far away from her as possible and something in her chest thrums at the small gesture before she shelves it for the moment. “Jax! Jax just,” she has to mercilessly push down the bubble of panic that was rising up within her own ribcage. “Listen to me, please. You haven’t- you’re not gone, not yet. We can fix this, we can fix this.”
Her last words feel like they’re more for herself than for him but she believes in them regardless of the possible hurt they might inflict on her later down the lane.
Jax shakes his head, the deep vantablack of abstraction making its way across his arms and almost reaching his shoulders already. His already labored breaths turn short and sharp, edging into something well beyond panic and closing in on the precipice of complete shutdown. It kills something inside her, to see him like this and not know what to do, what to say. It continues to spread, down his chest and up his neck. His expression is nothing but naked terror, it is the most vulnerable she’s ever seen him and she hates that it has to be like this. A cutoff sob crawls from his throat and it takes every once of Pomni’s self control not to break down on the spot. “I don’t want to go…”
She cannot leave him like this. The thought alone is like slapping her hand atop a hot stove and being unable to let go, the agony constant and searing. Before the abscess of abstraction consumes him, Pomni dashes towards him and closes her arms around his chest. The contact sends a bolt of lightning through her chest and her breathing hitches as it spreads out from him and into her. Jax’s eyes are the widest she’s ever seen, pupils shrunk almost into nothingness. He makes an attempt to push her off and cancels it mid-motion once he sees his own hands, panicked trembling follows as the absolute cold of abstraction starts crawling across Pomni’s chest. “Why? Why did you- why are you doing this?”
It crawls over them, faster and faster as Pomni holds Jax’s gaze, her calm if pained eyes a stark contrast to Jax’s nakedly horrified own. “Because I care.”
Abstraction consumes them.
※
There is a moment of quiet revulsion when Pomni realises that she’s seeing Jax’s closest, most guarded memories. It is a violation of his deepest sense of privacy, that of his own thoughts. The feeling wrapped around her ribs and resists her every attempt at dislodging it and pushing it down to be managed later once she’s alone, as she usually does with everything else. She grunted in frustration and left it be, background radiation to an already toxic state of mind.
She watched in quiet dread as Jax’s friendship with both Ribbit and Kaufmo progressed, anticipating with silent concern the moment that things imploded, which given that both former friends of Jax had abstracted, couldn’t have gone well at all. The conversation within Ribbit’s room leaves Pomni with an ache at the back of her skull, dull second-hand grief, wonder and vague suspicions she’d had since the dress incident nipping at the edges of her brain. Oh, Jax…
The following sequences are nothing but agony to watch and experience both. Jax, at his lowest, donning the only mask he felt secure behind and pushing everyone else away in a fit of bottomless self-loathing, putting on the carcass of his role and parading it around in a vague attempt at evading even the slightest shred of vulnerability.
She found him hugging his knees and resting against a streetlight, his back to her. “Why did you do this? This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was just…”
Pomni quietly scoffed as she approached, hands clenching by her sides, light anger simmering within. “You were just what, Jax? Supposed to disappear, to go out quietly in the dark, away from everyone?” A harsh breath escaped her before she could reign it in. “Fuck that.”
He drew more into himself, arms at his sides and slowly moving up and down, an attempt at self-soothing that had Pomni quietly wincing. She stepped closer still. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he repeated. “You were not supposed to care, you were not supposed to get close to me. You made this… you made this so much worse than it needed to be, so much more complicated.”
She exhaled, temper cooling but not gone. “I didn’t make it complicated, dummy. I just intervened before you could do something drastic.”
A wet chuckle, interspersed with a sob that wracked his frame and made Pomni itch to both strangle him on the spot and hug him and never let go again, lest he slip through her fingers. “And look where that got you, down here with me, and abstracting too. You’re always poking into things where you’re not needed or wanted, it’s infuriating and- and-,” the fight seemed to go out of him in one terrifying instant, only a whisper filled with dread coming out of his lips. “And it has killed you too. I killed-”
The weight of Jax’s trauma bore down on the back of her mind like an anvil strung up by a frayed thread that got thinner by the moment, and she knew that they didn’t have much time before they were both lost for good.
She kneeled by his side, arms open but not finishing the movement, leaving an empty space that’d fit his body. He looked at her, incomprehension and quiet resignation in his eyes. “Reach out to me,” she said quietly. “I cannot help you on my own, not entirely. So, please,” her chest constricted and it’s all she can do to kick down a sob, she feels wetness run down her face in tiny rivulets. “Please.”
Share the load.
Please, God, please.
Jax reached out to her in a flash, filling the space between her arms like the missing piece of a puzzle she’d been assembling ever since she got to the Circus.
※
Waking up is an exercise in pain tolerance. Her entire body feels like it’s burning up from the inside, consuming itself in an attempt to fight off an invasion. A groan escaped her as her hands clenched on nothing. She’s on the floor, she realised, and it takes an herculean effort to do so much as try to get on her knees. Her right eye is blurry and spotty, and her left one is…
She brings her right hand to her face and she has to simply stop and stare in stunned silence at the blackened scars crawling across her skin and consuming the entirety of her hand and most of the arm, tendrils creeping into her shoulder. Further inspection reveals that more strips of her have been lost to abstraction. Part of her neck, almost her entire right arm, and scattered scars across her torso, getting sparser the lower she looked, her legs being spared the worst of it. She touched her face with her left hand and she immediately came into contact with the strange warm-cold and staticky texture of abstracted flesh, a strip of it going from her forehead all the way to her neck and consuming the entirety of her left eye. It took her more than a couple of deep breaths to not fall into immediate panic, her emotions sharp and cutting. Her scars bristled with her agitation and it almost feels like there’s something right beneath the surface, ready to emerge once again and it makes everything so much harder than it should be, but she eventually brought her constricted chest back under control with deep, measured breaths.
Just push it down. Deal with it later.
She did, and it’s so much more difficult than it should have been that it leaves her winded. A pang of frustration echoed at the back of her brain and she took that and used it to fuel her movement, slowly sitting up and then standing up on wobbly, scarred legs.
Jax is right in front of her, and he looks just like a fucked up mirror of her. A light chuckle escaped her lips without warning as she lowered herself down, abstracted right hand hovering over his marks. For him it seems to be the contrary, with most of his scars being centered on his lower body. Most of his legs are gone as are parts of his abdomen and chest. His left arm is too, in a funny reflection to her own. He still had both eyes and most of his face untouched except for a big strip on his right cheek, under his eye, and the tips of his bunny ears are marked too.
Pomni’s right hand felt strange when touching Jax’s scars, a magnetic pull between them that made her need to apply the tiniest bit of effort in removing her hand before lowering it once again atop another scar and repeating the process. It’s morbidly entertaining.
Jax stirred and she made sure to use her left hand to softly jostle him. “Jax. Jax. Wake up.”
He groans and curls on himself, arms hugging his sides before the sensation of her right hand flesh rubbing against his marks froze him still. With a care and slowness worthy of handling a venomous snake, Jax looks at his left arm, almost pitch black and scarred, pockmarks that could almost be taken for eyes if you squint dotting it in nonsensical intervals. “What…” He looked at her and flinched back, horrified, gaze fixated on her face and, especially, her eye. “What, I, what have you done? What have I done to you?”
Pomni can sense something going taut with panic as the sicklysweet tar of guilt left a bad aftertaste at the back of her throat, emotions that she knows aren’t hers but that she feels anyway, radiating outwards from the back of her skull and bathing her brain with a static glow.
“This isn’t your fault,” she reassured him. Well, at least not entirely. Jax flinched the moment she finished her thought and Pomni grimaced, making sure to hold onto her own mind with an iron grip.
“But-”
“I chose this, and you don’t get to take that from me. I chose to follow you, I chose to hug you when you were in the middle of abstracting, I chose to help you, and you don’t get to take that away, not now, not ever.” She felt a retort rising from a throat that wasn’t hers and decided to smother it before it came out. “You reached out, but it was that or both of us abstracting. I wasn’t about to leave you alone after all of that, you, you- you absolute idiot.”
Jax stared at her in sullen silence, his usual heat sanded to a nub and unable to come out and lash out at her, too worn down, too tired. She extended her right hand and he took it with his left, the feeling of scar-on-scar contact sent a jolt of something indescribable through both of them before she managed to pull him to his feet, wobbly as they are. For a moment, they just look into each other’s eyes, a cocktail of emotions swirling within them both and mixing into an unrecognisable mess that leaves both of them sharply uncomfortable and unwilling to poke at it, at least for now.
“You’re dumber than I thought Pom Pom,” the poke fell flat and she knows it’s hollow and devoid of heat, she snorted anyway as they slowly made their way back to the main parts of the circus, back through all the nonsensical entrances and out of place exit doors.
“Look who’s talking, the guy who thought I’d leave him alone after finally gathering the courage to talk to me only to chicken out midway.” She looked directly into his eyes and his own seemed to be transfixed into her scarred eye. “Idiot.” He snorted and they fell silent, the air between them tense and relaxed in a dichotomy that made Pomni want to giggle herself into a coma. They don’t know what awaits them, but they know they have each other, for good or ill. At least, she knows she’ll be there for Jax.
Whether he wants to or not.
It takes awhile to adjust herself to the strange sight that her left eye feeds into her brain. It’s all weird shapes and stark colours and kind of nauseating to focus on, but she knows that there’s a method to the madness, otherwise the abstractions wouldn’t be able to move around without any measure of purpose. It’ll just take time, she mused. She stumbled and almost fell more than a couple times adjusting to only really being able to clearly see through one eye and Jax tiredly snorted at her misfortune, which earnt him a pointed glare and a kick on the shin, toppling him on the spot. He retaliated by hooking his foot under her leg and pulling as he fell and they both went down in a tangle of twitching limbs, scar rubbing scar and sending jolts under their skin. They stayed like that for a second, breathing heavy, eyes settled on nothing. “Jackass.”
“Shortstack.”
“Moron.”
“Clown.”
She looked at him with furrowed brows, gesturing at herself with a face that screams ‘really?’ and he winced. “Not my best line. A small mark in a spotless record, really.”
“You don’t say.”
The rocky ground of the mountain they’re laying on started to dig into Pomni’s back, and she makes an attempt at getting up, afterwards taking Jax’s scarred hand into her own as she helped him up. They leaned into each other as much as they could, which isn’t much but it’s not nothing, and the gesture itself helped them make the last leg of the small trek back to the dorms corridor. It loomed over them both with the promise of a new day and the coming calamity of having to confront the rest of the circus’ inhabitants, who are sure to make a myriad questions and poke and prod and try to get to the heart of the issue and Jax’s breathing is speeding up before he could bring it under control, hands clenched and shoulders tense until there’s a painful tug at the back of his neck from nerves alone.
Something pinched him in one leg and he almost jumped from fright, looking down at Pomni’s outstretched hand leaving his thigh, where a dull pain is already fading away. Her right hand is draped across his back and the strange flesh gives his waist a small squeeze in reassurance. Jax jumped away from Pomni once the feeling of vulnerability hits and he laughed nervously as Pomni glared at him, almost getting toppled from his brusque motions. “I’m fine,” he said without prompting and it’s one of his worst lies yet because it’s so very clear that he’s not, but Pomni decides that he can have this small victory, as a treat. Jax seethes at her raised eyebrow and the faint feeling of concern wrapped in smugness. “Whatever,” he bristles.
She knows that he’s only just starting to reconstruct his charade, his mask and walls, but she knows her way in regardless and that unnerves him. He turns towards his room before Pomni calls for him. “Hey, Jax?” He stops, halfway turning towards her. “If you need anything, talk to me.” She doesn’t phrase it like a request and neither does her tone indicate otherwise, but Jax does his best at an attempt to muster a dismissive tone anyway. “Yeah, sure.”
A beat of silence while he reached towards his door’s handle, quick steps before something grabbed his left arm and pulled down with enough force and surprise that he couldn’t really resist. With a small yelp, he’s eye to eye with Pomni and what he saw there leaves him nailed to the spot. “I wasn’t asking,” she almost seethed and he had to dryly swallow down. She pulled further down, their faces almost touching. “If you need anything, you talk to me.”
There’s something ugly and prickly and hot and oh so weird at the base of his throat blocking any attempt at speaking, so he nodded once, twice. Pomni searched his gaze for any attempt at deception and once satisfied she let him go with a hum. “Have a good night Jax.”
It’s the click of her door closing that snaps him out of the spell, and he quickly jittered his way into his room and slammed the door close as fast as possible, breathing quick and uneven. There’s a flavour of panic he’s not familiar with carving its way up his ribs and he’s too tired to even begin trying to examine whatever he’s feeling so he just ignores it, not like that ever hurt anybody.
With a grimace he fell down into his bed, healthy hand absentmindedly scratched at the scarred one and picked at the different bumps of skin here and there. There has just been too much, too fast, too complicated and he can feel his brain shutting down.
Unfortunately, tomorrow will be another day.
“Fuck.”