Chapter Text
Caine lied a lot, but apparently not about everything.
The pods had always been real. That much was clear.
Jax crashed to his knees as soon as the pod slid open, his mind tumble-drying in a never-ending expanse of stimulation. Everything was so dim in here, muted, but colors and scents and sensation pushed and shoved at him anyway, far more real than anything he’d felt in years.
Shit.
He’d been hoping that Kinger had been mistaken—that his memories had truly degraded so far that he could no longer remember the exit he had programmed in. But here Jax was. And reality was unmistakable.
Wasting no time, he pushed himself onto shaking legs, disregarding the figures emerging from the pods behind him as he scrambled out into the hall.
She was alive.
Relief and overwhelm enveloped Pomni in equal measures, and she had to take a moment to compose herself before she could take in her surroundings. Deep breaths, Pomni, it had only been a few months—hadn’t it?
Eventually, she gathered herself enough to tend to everyone else, who clearly weren’t adjusting quite as well as she had. In particular, one had hardly moved yet, her eyes clouded over but twitching—curly, auburn hair, a full figure, the sort of business casual outfit you’d expect from … Ragatha.
Pomni took a steadying breath, and through the pounding of her heart, she knelt down and extended a hand. Long, thin, brown fingers—nothing like the red and blue gloves, hardly so unwieldy, but now she surprised herself by managing to grasp Ragatha’s on her first attempt.
Ragatha’s hands were soft, a little plump, and carefully groomed, just like she was. Pomni only barely reminded herself to look up and continue to perceive, because even those hands were more than she had ever expected to see. She felt greedy to look Ragatha in the eyes and take in that deep, rich brown, and to notice the faint freckles splattered across her nose and cheeks.
“Everyone okay?” came a familiar voice. Ragatha startled, and Pomni was able to trace the voice to a person who must’ve been Zooble—colors, tattoos, piercings, too much to take in all at once. “Gangle?”
“Right here,” said a meek voice from a mousy woman whose hands fiddled with unfamiliar coils of dark hair. “I’m good.”
“Oh,” Ragatha said, blinking heavily. “I’m good, too.”
“Alive,” Pomni confirmed, rubbing at the headache beginning to form in her temples. “Uh, Kinger—”
“Me?” said a man, middle aged and blond but otherwise unremarkable, who was sitting leaned back against one of the opened pods. “I don’t mean to assume, but—”
“Oh, no,” Pomni couldn’t stop herself from saying. “I mean—yes, you’re Kinger. I think. Your voice sounds right. And you did say you might not… remember all of it.” She sighed at herself. “I was hoping you might, but I guess…”
“It’s okay, Pomni. I can remember some of it,” Kinger interjected. “Enough.”
“Okay, then, where’s Jax?” Zooble asked.
Pomni made brief eye contact with Ragatha again, frowning slightly, then stood to look around. As far as she could tell, nobody else was in the room with them at all, but six of the pods had open doors.
“He’s not here,” Gangle said, voice wavering.
“Do you think he got out before us?” Pomni suggested. “I mean, he definitely isn’t still in there. We made sure of it.”
Ragatha clasped her hands together uneasily. “I sure hope so. I just don’t want him to …”
“He’s probably somewhere in the building,” Zooble interrupted, “so let’s find his sorry ass and get out of here. I’m sick of … whatever this is.”
The building’s halls were dusty and echoed with every step. Caine had originally presented C&A as being still operational, and that clearly wasn’t true, which was great because Pomni would’ve been horrifically embarrassed to urbex her way into a regularly occupied building. They split up, sifting through the dozens of empty office rooms and meeting rooms and break rooms and bathrooms in search of anything more alive than a speck of dust.
Ultimately, Pomni found him not far from where they’d started. She opened the door to find an unfamiliar figure standing in front of a few more pods, these ones sealed. Dark hair, clothes baggy and unrevealing. With his back turned to her, she could still tell what thoughts were running through his mind.
“Jax,” she said, hesitating, not quite making the decision to step closer.
He didn’t move an inch, continuing to stare up at the sealed pods.
“You remember what Kinger said, right? These ones are empty. Anyone who abstracted—”
Jax cut her off with a sharp huff of laughter. “I know,” he spit out. “They’re gone, I know.”
She couldn’t get another word in before he was pushing past her, back out into the hallway. At a loss, she followed him, casting one last look back at the sealed pods. There was no glass to look through, no clear way to operate them, and she had a feeling she knew what would await her if she did manage to crack one open.
His steps were quick, a bit uneven, and she found herself nearly bumping into him several times. No matter how she turned, she could not catch a glimpse of his face, and it never felt like the right time to speak, so she didn’t.
They slowed near an open window. It was only then that Pomni realized how high up they were—C&A was a relatively large building, hence her saving it for when she was at her most down to use as a pick-me-up in her exploration ventures. Even now, their need for so much space eluded her. They were a few floors up.
She watched this realization dawn on Jax with a shift in his shoulders, and instinctively, she stepped between him and the window. A cool draft swept in from behind, and she shivered, finally looking at him level.
He had a black eye. That was the first thing that stood out to her. Kinger hadn’t been kidding when he’d warned them it would preserve their bodies exactly as they were … either that, or he’d gotten into something in the past twenty minutes. But no, it looked hours old, at least.
Dark eyes met hers for a split second before Jax scoffed and said, “Really, Pomni?”
But her heart was still racing, and no matter what his words were, because his expression was all wrong. It was flat, dead, nothing. And she knew him well enough to know he didn’t want to be here, in the real world. She’d figured that much out.
“Yes, really,” she said, crossing her arms. He was still so much taller than her, so she had to look up to catch his gaze, but she held it.
Unsurprisingly, given his behavior ever since the guns adventure, Jax relented very quickly. “Ugh, fine,” he said, and with minimal dramatics, he continued down the hall.
“So, where’re we headed?” Pomni asked, tailing close behind him yet again.
Jax stopped, and Pomni almost ran straight into him. “To be honest, I have absolutely no idea.”
Ragatha had a house, because of course she did. If anyone was going to have a house with a mortgage on auto-pay and enough in the bank to keep it going in her absence, it was going to be her. It was a miracle nobody had taken advantage of her absence, because the place was entirely empty. Abandoned, just like those buildings Pomni always liked to explore.
There was always the chance Ragatha’s mother had had a hand in this house still existing under her daughter’s name, Ragatha told them, but she looked uneasy to think about it or what it meant, so nobody pushed. Not even Jax, who seemed to love making her uncomfortable.
Pomni would have to check on the state of her own apartment, given she’d only been gone a few months, but as far as everyone else was concerned, it was between staying with someone’s parents or staying in Ragatha’s entirely empty house. There was a clear winner. What difference would a few more days make?
It was remarkable how easily they got from C&A to that fancy suburban neighborhood with what they still had in their pockets. Everyone had some spare cash, and Pomni’s card still hadn’t expired. Between them, they had … three smartphones and one charging cable and power bank that could charge two of them. Kinger and Ragatha seemed to have predated the kind of smartphone that was actually useful for navigation, and for some reason, Jax didn’t have one either. Still, some amount of internet access was better than none—Pomni’s data plan was still active, thankfully.
Only an hour later, while sitting around Ragatha’s dusty kitchen table, did Zooble finally ask, “So, uh, what are everyone’s names?”
“I’m Isa,” Pomni started—Isa. Her name was Isa. Relief surged through her when she reached the memory like it was nothing, even though it felt strange to say. “Ha! I remembered! Awesome.”
“Isa,” Ragatha echoed. “Is that short for Isabella?”
“Nope, just Isa,” Pomni said. “It means ‘one’—since I’m the first in my parents’ hearts and all. Don’t ask about my younger brother.”
“I didn’t know you had a younger brother,” Gangle said.
“I’ll bring you to meet him someday. All of you.”
“I’m … Naomi,” Gangle said slowly, as if the name were foreign to her. And it probably was, if the way Isa had felt in Pomni’s—Isa’s mouth was any indication.
“Naomi. I like it,” Zooble said. “It’s pretty.”
Naomi blushed, eyes darting down to the table. “Thanks.”
Zooble finally said, “You can call me … Sam. I’m gonna go with that one for now. But, uh, I strangely didn’t mind Zooble, so if that’s what you want to call me, I’m not gonna stop you.”
“I’m Louis,” not-Kinger-but-rather-Louis said.
“Nicole,” Ragatha said.
All eyes fell on Jax, then. The same Jax who had been conspicuously very quiet during this entire conversation, no less.
“Uh,” Jax said, and Isa blinked at him, waiting.
Silence stretched across the table for several seconds before being cut through by the sharp scratch of Jax’s chair against the tile floor. He stood, turned, and walked up the stairs without looking back.
“Huh,” Isa could only say, listening to a door shut. “Okay, then.”
No ID, no license, no phone, absolutely nothing on his person. Of course Jax had to be the one to arrive at that abandoned building without anything identifying at all.
Heart squeezing painfully, he tore through the entire upstairs, through each door and into each room, not really sure what he was looking for. Kneeling on the bathroom floor in front of the cabinet, sorting through cleaning supplies and over the counter pill bottles and so many things that were useless to him. Through a closet that must’ve been Ragatha’s, clothes and clothes and only clothes. Storage closet, spare towels and boxes of books and trinkets.
So eventually, he found himself kneeling on the bathroom floor again, door locked.
Jax—he was still Jax—wasn’t sure why he had waited this long already. Clearly, he wasn’t meant to have escaped in the first place. Back in the Circus, he’d been lined up for death already. This was wrong; his being here was wrong. He shouldn’t have followed them out so easily, shouldn’t have let them convince him that escape was safe and correct when he’d known all along that he wasn’t meant for anything real ever again.
There was no way that quarter-full bottle of ibuprofen would do anything, but it couldn’t hurt, right?
Fear shot through his chest to his stomach as he opened the bottle. There couldn’t have been more than thirty left. It had been a while since he’d put any thought into how much of these could kill a person, but he remembered the amount being higher than he’d expected. Maybe thirty was enough?
Choking down a small handful, Jax began to sort through the rest of the bathroom cabinet again. Was Ragatha on no prescriptions? Maybe bleach would kill him. He could drink bleach. What other cleaning chemicals did she have—would soap kill him? Just plain old hand soap?
Another small handful of ibuprofen. It was going down easier than he had expected it to.
An old, rusty razor. He could work with that. Ragatha surely kept her spare blades somewhere.
His hands were shaking.
No spare blades in this cabinet. They were probably somewhere else in this house, and he didn’t want to go looking, so he grabbed the rusty one again and popped it open, slipping the thin, flat sheet of metal out. With any luck, it was still sharp enough.
Another small handful of ibuprofen. It caught in his throat, and he coughed three up back into his hand, then shoved them back in, wiping the residue on his pants.
Abstraction hadn’t seemed so bad, in those moments he’d come so close. Maybe death was similar. Maybe he could finally be done with everything.
Jax had done a lot of things, but taking a blade to his own skin was one thing he hadn’t done. Tentatively, he pressed the corner into the pad of his thumb, removing it just as quickly. Painless—was he meant to have felt something?—and blood beaded up in the same spot within seconds, rolling down his hand.
Okay. He could definitely work with that. He tossed his hoodie to the side and wiped his hand on his jeans.
Pinching the blade between his still-bleeding thumb and forefinger, Jax contemplated for half a second what he was doing. This wasn’t the rainbows of abstraction; his skin was actually, truly skin, and there was blood and bone beneath, and when he pressed the sharp ridge into his flesh, it split and burned.
It took a second for blood to well up in the wound, but when it did, it was quick—and then it spilled over just as quick, and Jax watched it roll over the slope of his arm and drip onto the tile flooring once, twice.
Years had passed since Jax had last seen his own blood. It was mesmerizing, uncomfortably human. There was entirely too much of it under his skin, bulging his body, and he needed to release it. It was too human for him. It didn’t belong there.
Shit. He was getting blood on Ragatha’s floors.
Something felt so wrong about that, enough to pierce the fog cloaking his mind and interrupt what he was doing.
They could find him here. Sure, the door was locked, but that was it. They would find him here, dead, and then they would know. And they would have to see—
Jax took a breath, rolling a wad of toilet paper around his hand and valiantly attempting to wipe the floor clean of blood. He pressed his bleeding arm into the fabric of his T-shirt, hoping to at least keep the blood contained for now. He wasn’t bleeding very much. That wouldn’t be enough, but at least he knew he could.
His strategy succeeded only in smearing blood across the floor. Impatient, he hauled himself to his feet, taking one last handful of ibuprofen. He couldn’t just walk out and down the stairs; everyone would see him, and his shirt was already stained with splotches of red. Instead, he quietly slipped out into the hallway, back into Ragatha’s room, up to her bedroom window.
It squeaked when he unlatched it, and it took some force to open, but eventually, a chilly nighttime breeze greeted him. His bleeding had slowed, so he used one hand to push himself through the window until he was hanging off it, keeping the razor blade in his other hand.
It was a small drop, but pain still shot through his ankles and up to his knees when he landed. Hissing, he turned; his heart fell to his stomach when he caught someone’s eyes through the lower, first-floor window. Dark, wide eyes—Gangle.
Swearing, he turned again, heading for the corner. He didn’t know where he was headed, only that he needed to get away and alone quickly. His heart galloped urgently in his chest, and halfway down the block, it became all he could hear.
This was fine. If they’d stayed in the Circus, he would be dead now, anyway. And he’d been fine with that, had welcomed it with the gentlest of relieved smiles he hadn’t even known himself capable of.
Questions for himself formed in his mind, and he crushed them all before they could emerge from the cracks between his thoughts.
Everything was cold when Jax made it to the park. The only lights were in the empty parking lot, and a minute further found Jax bathed in complete darkness. The trees overhead blotted out what little moonlight might’ve seeped through the clouds, and Jax could hardly see his own hands.
He sat in the grass, heart rate slowing as he positioned the blade between his thumb and forefinger once again. With the lighting here, he couldn’t see his veins, so he’d just have to make do with what he could feel—running his fingers over his wrist yielded only what he figured was a tendon, but the veins couldn’t be far off, right?
Were those even the right ones? There were probably places he could bleed out faster from. But he didn’t want to cut himself across the neck, and he didn’t want to bleed out with his pants off, and he hadn’t spent nearly enough time researching this years ago as a depressed teenager, apparently.
Gritting his teeth, he brought the sharp edge of the blade to his wrist again.
Do it.
What was he waiting for, exactly?
He pressed it in. It burned, and he flinched the blade back, half expecting a surge of warm blood, but none came.
Shit. This had been far easier the first time.
Deep breaths, disappear. Jax wasn’t here. The blade would move down and out, no different from slicing raw meat to cook. Little to no resistance.
The next one was longer but no deeper. Stinging ran from his wrist and up his forearm now, with nothing to show for it.
What a shitty suicide method. He should’ve chosen another one he couldn’t possibly ruin with cowardice. There were so many that required as little as a single step forward, and he’d chosen the one that had him take a blade to his own flesh.
Tears of frustration pricked at the corners of his eyes, and he leaned into the feeling. How horrible this all was. How horrible it was that he was alive again. How horrible that he was too afraid to finish the problem once and for all.
If he stayed here, alive …
The only thing worse than before was the knowledge that now, there were five more people who knew him. They knew enough about him to hate him and to worry about him and there was nothing worse than knowing they would provide a home for him if he asked.
Jax wasn’t here. The body was frustrated, enraged even, so it pressed in deep and swiped hard.
He gasped.
That one felt different. Colder and warmer all at once, and it sent sparks of pain through his fingertips.
Heart skipping a beat, Jax let the razor blade fall from between his fingers and into the grass below. His hand found his opposing wrist, feeling along it as slick, warm blood welled up in a long laceration.
He could feel its ridges, gaping slightly and dipping in the middle. It burned when he touched it.
Breathing shakily, he waited. And waited.
And waited.
Aside from gradually growing colder, nothing happened at all.
Warm blood seeped into the fabric of his pants and shirt and cooled, and more came and cooled and dried, and nothing happened.
Numbly, Jax continued to sit there in the darkness, listening to the wind rustle the leaves in the trees and wondering how long it had been since he’d heard nature.
Well. What now?
His arms and hands felt sticky, numb with cold, but he was frustratingly conscious. His knees felt wet from the grass as he pushed himself to his feet.
Jesus, he wasn’t even dizzy. What a deeply inadequate amount of blood loss, apparently.
If he were better at this, he might’ve crouched down and combed the damp grass for the blade to try again, and do it properly this time. But he was too tired, and it probably wouldn’t work anyway. He was weak like that.
Jax could’ve stayed behind in the Circus and let himself abstract. Then he’d be effectively dead by now, abstracted, trapped in those pods with a fractured mind until the end of everything. It had been so much easier than this was, so much warmer and more tempting, and now, he was too numb to feel as much fear as he needed to follow through.
Whatever. He could keep trying tomorrow. It wasn’t like he was on a time limit, and this annoyingly human body had decided his previous distress meant nothing, and now he wanted to sleep.
Jax walked the short distance back to Ragatha’s place, surprised to find he remembered where it was. He hadn’t exactly planned on coming back. As expected, the lights were out—he had no idea what time it was, but it’d been dark for enough hours that it couldn’t have been earlier than midnight.
In Ragatha’s driveway, Jax stopped for a moment to wonder what he was doing.
Last they’d seen him, he’d sprinted off upstairs. He hadn’t wanted to see them again, and they definitely didn’t want to see him either. But God, he was so tired, and there was only one place that would welcome him for one last night.
Her door was locked. It figured.
To make matters worse, his stomach was starting to cramp. It wasn’t even an intense pain, just enough to tell him that he had in fact swallowed a third of a small bottle of ibuprofen on an empty stomach, and enough to only intensify his want to curl up in bed.
Sighing to himself, Jax began a slow walk around the perimeter of the house, gauging whether or not he could enter through a window without breaking it. They all seemed pretty locked and pretty sturdy. What a bummer.
Turned out he was too tired to care about that, too. Maybe he’d go sleep in the grass in Ragatha’s backyard.
“Jax?” said a familiar voice—Zooble. Jax’s blood ran cold.
They were standing in the door, the very open door, even though it was perfectly dark inside. Jax resisted the urge to bolt. This hadn’t been the plan at all. He felt very suddenly aware of the blood on his arms, shirt, hands, still oozing like sap from his arm.
“Please tell me you’re the only one awake right now,” he said with a hollow laugh, turning to face them a few seconds too late after he had already crossed his arms over his chest, as if that would hide anything. Shit, he really shouldn’t have taken off his hoodie just to reach his arms. Everything was too painfully obvious in this T-shirt.
“Uh, yeah.” Zooble paused, their dark silhouette leaning heavily against the doorframe. “I’m … the only one awake.”
Their words were clipped and weak, and Jax shoved down any impulse to ask if they were alright and instead said, “You should fix that. I don’t want you here.”
As he winced at his own words, Zooble said, “Nah.” They turned their head and coughed a few times; it was a sharp sound. Once they caught their breath, they elaborated, “Would you even have been able to make it back inside if I wasn’t awake?”
Jax drew closer, finally, finding strange comfort in the fact that Zooble hadn’t commented on all the blood. “What, were you waiting for me?”
Zooble’s eyes flicked down over Jax’s chest and to his crossed arms. Whatever reaction they may have had internally, they did a good job of hiding it.
It didn’t escape Jax that their breathing was fast, a bit labored. He couldn’t really stop himself from asking any longer. “So, what’s your deal? Why are you …”
“Dust mite allergy, asthma, nothing crazy,” Zooble said, breathing heavily after as if the words had taken a lot out of them. “Ragatha’s old bedding … not pleasant.”
Wordlessly, Jax followed them inside. He supposed it was a good sign that they were on their feet. Blinking the fuzzy feeling out of his head, he asked, “Don’t you have a … thing? Inhaler?”
Zooble crashed into the couch, chest heaving, and rooted around in their pocket, eventually displaying the object in question. “It’s years expired. Tried it, didn’t work so well.”
That sounded rough. Jax nodded awkwardly and made to head upstairs, but Zooble stopped him with a raised hand.
“Wait,” they said. “I’m not gonna ask questions. But you’re also not going to bed bleeding.”
“What do you care?” Jax said. “Tomorrow, I—”
Right. They didn’t know he was going to die tomorrow. He shut up, jaw clicking closed.
“Look. Jax, or whatever your name is.” They paused, tipping their head back and just breathing. “As much as I … hate you, I’m not evil. Not-evil people generally help not-evil people in need.”
“Right. And that describes me perfectly.”
“You aren’t evil. Go get the first-aid kit.” Another pause to breathe. “There’s one under the bathroom sink.”
“Don’t you have a girlfriend to protect from me or something? You’re sympathizing with the enemy.”
They glared at him, unimpressed. “Go get it.”
Jax disappointed himself by dragging himself up the stairs, grabbing the first-aid kid, and heading back downstairs. It would’ve been so easy to contradict Zooble, but he didn’t. He didn’t even pause in the middle to think about it. Everything was warm and tingly, and his stomach hurt, and he was so frustratingly alive.
First thing when he got downstairs, he turned the light on. He regretted it immediately when the blood all over his arms and shirt suddenly seemed a lot more red, but he wasn’t about to back down on his decision.
When he sat next to Zooble on the couch, he noticed he could hear a high-pitched wheeze with their every breath. He wondered if they would be okay, but that wasn’t his job to wonder, and Zooble’s real friends were fast asleep.
“No questions,” Jax repeated as he handed them the first-aid kit. Then he extended his arm.
For the first time since he’d cut it, he took a proper look at it. Two cuts—one shallow one, short and interrupted by a much longer, deeper one that extended straight from the inside of his wrist to halfway up his forearm. It was both deeper and shallower than he’d expected, the edges split and the depths of it almost bubbly in appearance.
“Hm.” Zooble opened the first-aid kit. “Actually, I’m gonna need you to go wash that off in the sink before I do anything.”
Jax’s heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t expected them to keep their word, but here they were.
It stung when he ran it under the water, but he lazily complied, not bothering to make sure he was thorough. Infection wouldn’t matter if he was dead.
Zooble had their phone open when he got back, and they visibly had an article on laceration care open on their phone. They grabbed him by the hand, eyes scanning over his arm and then back to their phone.
“I think we need to take you to the—”
“No,” Jax interrupted, “we don’t.”
“Well, this is deeper than we’re meant to deal with on our own.”
Jax rolled his eyes. “Great help, Doctor Zooble. I’m going to bed. Are there any free beds, or are you on the couch for a reason?”
Before he could even get up, Zooble grabbed him by the hand again, turning his arm over. Their lip curled up in a dissatisfied grimace, and they eventually muttered, “Fine. I’ll do what I can.”
He let himself drift a bit as they poked and prodded at his arm. This would be over soon. All of it. What was happening right now didn’t matter at all. Useless nausea continued to churn in his gut, painfully inadequate for what it was meant to have accomplished.
Of course, Zooble had to talk eventually.
“You really aren’t all that,” they said.
Jax blinked a few times, returning to himself, then choked on a laugh. “Uh, what does that even mean?”
“I said what I said.” Zooble rummaged through the first-aid kit once more. “You’re too self-important.”
“Not gonna elaborate?”
“Do you want me to?”
“No.”
“Good. Didn’t think you would.” They turned their head to cough a few times into their elbow. Sharp, wheezing sounds—it would’ve been concerning if Jax cared about them. “What’s your name, by the way? Or … what do you want to be called?”
All at once, Jax yanked his arm back, partially unraveling the bandage and dislodging the gauze pad. His name? He still didn’t know his fucking name. It would’ve been so nice to remember it, but he couldn’t even have that, because the world wanted so badly to remind him he wasn’t welcome here.
It didn’t matter. Tomorrow, he would be dead.
“I don’t know,” he said softly. Cringing at himself, he said louder, “Jax is fine.”