Chapter Text
Pomni is almost always a little nervous, a little overreactive, but she’s sure when she feels the simulated adrenaline bloom in her guts this time that she’ll need it. She’s sure that the ice pouring into her stomach is called for, because something is inarguably wrong. She just doesn’t know what yet.
“Do it.”
Jax’s eyes are glazed over, dilated to the point where the gold is nearly completely eclipsed. His smile, ever-present, is far too wide, and his movements are stilted, too quick, unnatural, like he’s missing frames of animation. He’s holding her gun to his forehead so firmly that the grip of his hand squeezed over hers is on the verge of painful.
Pomni’s digital heart pounds against her sternum, and she feels the instinct to yank her hand away and bolt. It’s fear that’s coursing through her. Not caution, not anxiety, but an ancient, bone-deep string of chemical reactions in her brain triggered upon sensing something human-adjacent, uncanny and dangerous.
But…it’s Jax.
He’d grab at her hair or pull on her limbs, stretch her and squish her in ways that defy the skeleton under her rubbery skin, dribble her like a basketball if he thought it would be funny, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Not truly. Not in the way where it would be reasonable for her body to react the way it is now, looking into his face, sensing a vague but certain threat to her very life and making her fear for her self preservation.
It’s Jax.
So…her gut must be wrong. She’s a high-strung person, and the cast had all had an adrenaline-filled shootout royale just moments ago, she’s probably just…still reeling from that. So she plants her feet and muscles past the instinct to run and asks if they’ll still be friends.
“We were never friends.”
It’s the jolt of confusion and little thread of pain that lance through her heart that dispel the knee-jerk need to flee that had gripped her by the veins and allow Pomni to continue the discourse. Or maybe it’s that Jax doesn’t trigger that reflex in her again because the anger that radiates off him in waves as they begin to argue, then fight in earnest, makes hers in turn rise and swallow up the traces of fear left in her black and oily digital blood.
She chooses not to examine too closely that it’s not the frustration and rage at his emotional betrayal alone that fuel her manic onslaught of teeth and claws and improvised weapons. She hadn’t chosen flight, after all. But, after throwing furious words so sharp and venomous they cause her to physically recoil (It would have hurt less had he struck her, and she’s sure he knows it. Sure he knows she knows it), when Jax turns, exhausted, and insists she stop looking for the good in him, the feeling he leaves her with isn’t that nebulous sense of danger, of something being inexplicably and unidentifiably but inarguably wrong.
She’s just sad. For both of them.
Time isn’t real in the Circus, but it still feels like it’s late. Or maybe today had just been taxing. Pomni doesn’t really remember getting into her plain blue pajamas or placing her stupid hat on her bedside table, and she isn’t exactly tired, just drained as she lays in bed, staring at the canopy draped over her between her bedposts.
The awards show had been weird (not like Pomni had expected it to be anything but), but she’d really only been paying half attention at best to Caine and his antics onstage. She’d been acutely aware of the empty seat between Ragatha and Kinger, heart going out to the row of chairs along the back wall, as far away from the proceedings as possible. Jax had already left by the time the show ended, and since she’d exited the theater and passed by the seat he had chosen, isolated, empty, she’s been in a haze, save for a persistent needling feeling that’s keeping her awake. He’d been so purposefully, viciously cruel to her. And yet.
“I didn’t think you cared about what other people like.”
“That…I just—oh, yeah, y-you’re right. I don’t.”
She sighs, dragging her hands down her face. For all his theatrics, for all the ways he’s versed in gleefully hurting everyone around him, Jax is a really bad liar. His face had been listing back toward the uncanny arrangement of eerie smile and too-wide pupils when he’d said he’d forget about her if she abstracted. Something off had circled back around in his expression, the way he carried himself, when she’d presented him with a question that would define their relationship. It felt deeper, blacker than just a lie, but, whatever flavor his maladaptive front took on, he’d still made it quite clear that he doesn’t want anything to do with her (or anyone in the Circus). So why should she care? Besides, Jax would hate to have her come knocking. Her next days would doubtlessly be an endless stream of belittlement and torment as a punishment for her daring to check up on him if she did.
He might hate having her reach out, but…
“In this world, the worst thing you can do is make someone think they’re not wanted or loved.”
Pomni exhales deeply as Kinger’s wisdom circles the inside of her skull. Yeah, that’s exactly what Jax is trying to do—be the worst one here. Doesn’t mean she has to respond in kind. She allows herself a moment to yell frustratedly into a pillow, knowing she’s choosing the path forward that will doubtlessly be detrimental to her, before she kicks the blankets off her and sighs, rolling onto her bare feet and padding to her doorway.
Jax’s visage greets her from his portrait hung on his door directly across from hers, as usual. What’s not usual is that, if Pomni looks carefully in the semi-darkness of the hallway, she can see Jax’s door isn’t closed all the way. She bunches her mouth to the side.
Jax never lets anyone see the inside of his room, much less leave his door unlocked or cracked open in a manner where anyone could theoretically let themselves in—not that anyone would necessarily want to, but that hardly is a factor when Jax’s paranoia is accounting for things. He would deny it to his grave, but over the course of the last few adventures especially, Pomni has begun to notice undeniable signs that Jax is constantly on edge: The way his eyes shift sometimes; his veiled but still overt distrust of the others; his nuclear meltdown earlier had just been the most recent in a string of tells. He would despise her for being able to see through the cracks of the mask he thinks he’s so carefully constructed, yet here she is, about to march over to his door and make it clear that she can do exactly that.
She hums, worrying at her lip. Is the cracked open door…an invitation? It sure would track if the only way Jax would be able to bring himself to reach out to anyone would be through something vague and roundabout and plausibly deniable. That’s what he’d done with her during the lightning round adventures, after all. Nobody on Earth save for Jax would seek to learn mundane information like Pomni’s age or her favorite color in such an unhinged manner.
She quietly crosses the hall, trying to keep her head high. Even if Jax throws insults at her for intruding, she’s decided that she’ll take the high road and be a good friend to him—even if he won’t be in turn for her. Her heart twinges a little at the thought and she exhales sadly. Jax almost certainly doesn’t want company. But again, maybe he needs it. And Pomni thinks she’s probably the only one in the Circus willing to roll the dice on that and go out of her way for him. So she knocks on the door.
“Jax?” She murmurs, not wanting her voice to carry to neighboring rooms. “Your door’s open. You alright?”
There’s no answer. Pomni’s mouth thins, and even as she knows he’d probably string her up by her hat for letting herself in, she gently pushes on the door. It swings inward with a creak that wouldn’t have been haunting had it not opened onto dead silent pitch blackness.
Jax’s blown out pupils.
Pomni shivers. The desire to flee rears its head in her guts again and her breaths become shaky in a way they haven’t since first landing in the Circus. If Jax has abstr—
She hurriedly shakes the thought away. Besides, Jax is the furthest from insane or obsessed with finding an exit out of the whole cast. Just by virtue of his ability to play by the rules of the Circus, every one of them is more likely to lose their minds and fully abstract before he’d even be in danger of it (Plus, the room is dark and silent, no rampaging monster full of glowing eyes to be found).
He’s definitely still not responding to her calling out to him, though. Something is still off. There’s still ice in her veins. She fumbles along the wall for a light switch, hoping being able to see will alleviate the fear building in her chest. When she finds it, the fixture it illuminates on the ceiling is pitiful, three out of four bulbs burnt out, but it’s bright enough for her to discern the structures Jax has in his room, namely and most unexpectedly, there’s a gigantic, living tree taking up the entire far wall.
Curiosity killed the cat, Pomni thinks wryly to herself as she takes a cautious step into the room. Her foot falls on something soft, and when she looks down there is grass poking up between her toes, flattened in a rough path that leads from the threshold to the gnarled roots at the base of the tree.
…But satisfaction brought it back. She steps fully into Jax’s room and pushes the door nearly closed behind her, cracked open just as she’d found it.
“Jax?” She tries again, with similar results. She cautiously paces forward along the faint footpath. The room isn’t much bigger than hers, but other than the ceiling light, it’s all foliage designed to mimic a sprawling meadow. If she squints, some of the little knolls up against the walls might have crude shelves built into them, but there’s definitely no bed to speak of or any other overt human fixtures.
She continues toward the tangle of roots, spotting a notable gap the footpath disappears down into, and when she gets down onto a knee to examine it, she peers into what she realizes is a fucking burrow. How much of a rabbit did Caine intend Jax to be? The uncomfortable thought settles on a backburner in her brain to simmer as she calls for him again.
“Hey…Jax? I, uh…” She shifts nervously at the entrance. “I know you’ll probably kill me for this, but I’m coming in, okay?”
She slides her legs into the gap between the roots. She really should have put her shoes on, she thinks bitterly as dirt and dry leaves crunch under her feet, hesitantly standing and testing the height of the tunnel she finds herself in. Jax is twice as tall as she is, so she’s a little surprised when the top of her head grazes the packed dirt of the ceiling. Jax would have to crawl.
She screws up her mouth. The tunnel has some low ambient light coming from nowhere, and seems to dip downward and double back on itself in a hairpin turn. Pomni hums unhappily, reminded briefly of being dragged into the floor of Mildenhall Manor, but she carefully steps forward, trying not to slip and lose her footing on the loose leaves lining the tunnel which seems to get darker the deeper she ventures.
As she moves slowly, hand braced along the wall, she wonders if this is why Jax doesn’t let anyone into his room. He makes a show of confidence about his avatar (as he does about everything else), but it’s beginning to dawn on Pomni that the bravado about his ears and tail being the height of masculinity is probably serving a purpose more sinister than being just a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment that they all look stupid but at least he looks the best (he does, but still). She uncomfortably mulls over the possibility that Caine setting him up with no human trappings in his living quarters might have had a hand in influencing his…she’ll call it philosophy…about being in the Circus. Archetypes, he’d said. Everyone stripped to their framework, a bubble map of personality traits. Not fully realized. Not fully human anymore.
The funny one. A silly rabbit.
The third and seemingly final downward hairpin turn is where she loses her footing. She manages to clamp her mouth shut around any yelp that might have tried to escape, but that’s the limit of the damage she can mitigate. Of course this last stretch of tunnel is where the angle becomes steeper, and dragging her fingers in the dirt does little to slow her descent as her slide turns into a tumble. She feels leaves get stuck to her hair as she’s spat out into a wider space, rolling with enough cartoonish momentum to knock her into the packed dirt of the wall opposite the mouth of the cavern.
Eyes certainly full of dizzy swirls, Pomni rights herself, sitting on her knees and distantly picking dried leaves out of her bangs as she tries to take in her new surroundings in the deeper dimness. It sort of seems like it’s just more of the same, save for a pile of something she can see if she squints is distinct from the leaflitter and packed dirt. Blankets?
The shape moves with a sharp inhale.
“…You shouldn’t be here.”
Hearing Jax’s voice brings a wave of relief, even muffled and obviously in a pitch anyone would understand is painting his words as a threat. Pomni puts a hand to her chest, holding her heart down like it’s a fluttering bird as she shuffles onto her feet and faces the heap of fabric concealing Jax.
“I know. I really am sorry, but you weren’t answering—”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Pomni’s mouth snaps closed with a click. She knew he’d be mad, but his voice is deadly. If he’d opened with yelling at her it would be something she could diffuse or at least match, but calm also isn’t the right word; his rage right now is even and pressurized and volatile enough to scare her, like a snake prepped to strike should she so much as breathe too loudly. Calm isn’t the right word. It feels off.
Mouth too wide. Eyes too black.
She swallows nervously.
“I-I’ll leave, I promise. As soon as I…” As soon as she checks on him? No chance that would go over well on a good day, and this is not that. So what she says instead is, “…As soon as I apologize. For attacking you before.”
Jax laughs, and the sound is the most hate-filled, venomous thing she’s ever heard come out of his mouth.
“Oh. Oh, you’re sorry, are you, Pomni?”
The shape under the blankets shifts. Pomni braces for an argument that’ll dwarf the one they had earlier, but as the fabric falls away from his lanky form as Jax stands, her breath catches in her throat. He looks awful, like he’s been taken by fever. His fur is clumped together in places with sweat, and his eyes, even in the low light, are clearly bloodshot—not in the way they would be if he’d been crying, but in the way they’d be if he hadn’t slept in days. His overall straps are pulled from his shoulders, loops of fabric hanging uselessly at his hips, and Pomni can see places where Jax must have scratched at his fur, rubbing it away and leaving the flesh bare and raw and nearly black with the blood brought to the surface of his skin.
“…Jax. God, Jax, what…?” Her hands flutter forward.
“What are you really sorry for, huh, Pom-Pom?” He takes a menacing step toward her. Her heel hits the wall behind her. “You sorry you fell for the act? You’re sorry you wasted your time on me? Huh?”
“W-Wait, what? N-No…” Her confusion comes second as her voice suddenly trembles. Has Jax always been this much bigger than her?
“Oh but I bet you are.” His teeth shine, sharp in the low light as a grin like baring his fangs at her crosses his face. “I bet you’re full of regrets concerning little old me, especially right now, after coming all the way down here to my little corner of hell and picking up the rock I live under. You satisfied with what you found, Pomni?” He lurches forward, like something tied to his sternum had been sharply yanked. “You satisfied, watching me squirm? What’s your next step, huh? Pour salt on me? Spray me with poison? How are you planning to make it hurt, Pom? Tell me.”
“Wh-What? What are you t—? I…I don’t want to hurt y—”
“You will!” His voice rattles the burrow and Pomni has to cover her mouth with both hands to stop the startled, frightened sound in her chest from escaping. “That’s all anyone ever does here! Why don’t you get it? Why don’t any of you get it?” Jax’s eyes are shining, manic, the gold in them brighter than she remembers. “What’s left of your life, Pomni?” He spits the words like it’s an accusation. “You haven’t eaten real food in months! You’ll never see the real sun again! You don’t have your family, your friends, your job, your home, your body! Your name! What’s left, huh?”
“I-I…” Pomni’s mind races. What could she possibly say to Jax right now? Is it even possible to reach him as he is, so deeply enraged it’s like he’s rabid?
“I’ll tell you what’s left,” He hisses, taking another stilted, too-quick step toward her. “The only leftovers from our reality we get to have, the only thing we’re allowed to keep is the pain. And in here, you can either be the one doling it out or the one taking it.” He tilts his head, wrathful gaze searing through slitted eyes, but his voice nearly softens when he says, “I slipped up, you know. I thought maybe you could be doling it out with me. But,” The sharpened edges return tenfold as his words pierce her: “…you’re clearly not cut out for it, because here you are, making sure I’m okay.”
The unilateral hatred in his expression nearly brings tears to Pomni’s eyes. It’s…
It’s so full of pain.
And she’s the only one here, the only one who could try and soothe it now, even if he doesn’t want her to. Especially if he doesn’t want her to. So she steels herself, taking in a steadying breath, shuddery as it might be, but she doesn’t get the chance to plead with him. Jax all at once doubles over, nearly falling forward, and a shudder travels through him from tail to teeth, mouth hanging open around a sudden gagging sound. Shock ignites in Pomni’s insides as black sludge forces its way up Jax’s throat and splatters onto the leaflitter at his feet, leaving him gasping for air, and she can’t help the reflexive step back she tries to take, only to be met with the wall behind her once more.
He’s in a much worse way than she could have imagined, and Pomni finds herself out of her depth. She’d been expecting Jax to be livid, but she could handle him livid. She’d instead stumbled upon him livid and sick. Distressingly so. Trying to ease or even just come to terms with the emotional anguish radiating off him like heat might have to come second.
“Jax, you…you’re ill. C-Come on, let’s go find Caine—"
“No!” His shout is so loud and sharp Pomni can feel it reverberate off the burrow walls, vibrating in the liquid inside her eyes. “Caine will—! You’re t-t-tr-trying to—! Y-Y-You can’t lea-leave!” Pomni’s blood freezes when his cries begin to glitch. “You’re tr-trying to put m-m-me in the cellar!”
Jax’s avatar pulses, chest making a series of horrible cracking sounds like all his ribs had been broken at once from his lungs being forcibly overfilled as his whole torso throbs, skin like the surface of a disturbed purple lake. He seems to pay it no mind, eyes full of fury and fear focused on her, and then the gold ripples outward from his constricted pupils—followed by a wave of teal.
“Jax!” Pomni finds her voice as a sob. “Jax, no, stop, no, nobody is trying to put you in the cellar!”
“Liar!”
The frame of Jax’s model contorts, head jerking to the side and dragging his center of gravity along with it like he’s being pulled to the floor by a collar, leaving him on all fours.
Run.
One of his shoulders cracks out of place, arm dislodging itself from its socket like it had been pushed aside from within. Pomni feels her eyes shrink to pinpricks, scream caught in her throat as she watches his arm shudder, the shoulder blade on that side suddenly jutting painfully upward in a way that stretches his skin.
Run! Danger!
Like something is wedging the scapula away from his ribs, his fur there pulls taut, becoming thinner and thinner until something pierces through.
Wrong! Wrong! Danger!! Run!!
Inky black spikes burst in a column from Jax’s shoulder, ripping his flesh apart and fanning upward like a hellish, unctuous wing. It flexes outward, a hundred technicolor eyes splitting open along it like wounds in their own right, and then it slams onto the floor next to him, shoving his body up from its crouched position like it were another arm. Pomni watches in helpless terror as abstraction—and it is abstraction—spreads from the wound in his shoulder and overtakes one of his ears, making it elongate and split, spikes branching along the length like a horrible antler curving back from his head. When it races down to his fingers, his glove instantly shreds apart to accommodate his digits doubling in length, pointed like daggers at the ends, dripping black like the corrupted form is oozing the oil-colored blood present in all their avatars. Is it blood? Is it Jax’s?
Pomni can’t hold in the sob that escapes her at that thought.
She really should have.
The sound draws Jax’s attention. He jerks his head up to glare at her with neon eyes.
Then he lunges.
The wind is knocked from her as Jax’s extra limb born of abstraction slams her into the packed dirt of the burrow wall, robbing her of any scream, whether in fear or pain, pinning her in place under tendrils of ink and eyes that feel like static across her skin.
“You-u-u sh-sh-should’t be h-e-e-e-e-re!”
His mouth is open wide around the shriek, teeth parted, razor sharp. In that moment, Pomni has few places she can look other than down his throat, only to be left horrified when she finds it black, lined with multicolored eyes, a cavern of nightmarish crystals. The white skin of her cheeks glows in her peripheral vision with the waves of yellow and teal and pink cast from Jax’s howling maw.
This…none of this should be happening to him. Right? Jax is the only one in the cast not trying to find a way out to any degree. He’s the only one who seems to thrive under the restrictions and rules of the Circus. He’s arguably the sanest one among them. So why? Why is he abstracting?
“I’d move on, and probably forget about you.”
Eyes more black than gold. A carefully curved grin.
He made a show of being aloof, being somehow above everyone else by virtue of his ability to feel nothing, but…of course he doesn’t feel nothing. His rage during their argument after she’d implied they’d become friends is clear proof of that. He’s being overtaken from the inside, the abstraction displacing bone and bursting from holes blown in his skin, crawling up from his guts and out his mouth in a way that makes Pomni think of Jax’s body like an overcrowded cage, every new “undesirable” feeling added to the lockbox and stuffed down until there had been simply no room left. It’s like he’d been pushing every single emotion other than malice down for so long, it’s all compressed and combined into a being of its own. A creature left ignored and given little else to do but grow bigger and stronger inside Jax, and now it’s clawing its way forcibly out of his body, desperate, like…like it’s crying for help. Like Jax is crying for help.
…Could it be that he’s…could it be that it’s…it’s like he’s abstracting because his heart had broken under the pressure of living in the Circus rather than his mind.
The thought of Jax—carefree, confident, one-step-ahead Jax—heartbroken…it inspires the tears that had been gathering in Pomni’s eyes to track down her cheeks, refracting the light from the thousand eyes in Jax’s throat.
“J-Ja…Jax,” Pomni wheezes out, digital diaphragm still frozen and breath still knocked from her lungs. “I w-want to help. Please.”
“Sh-Shu-t-t-t up!” Jax rears back and rakes his abstracted fingers down Pomni’s chest, black claws shredding her shirt open with a triplicate of blacker gashes, dark blood running hot along her sternum and drawing a strangled cry from her. “I’I’I’m the one who cau-causes pain f-for fun!” Jax shoves his face into hers, gripping her chin hard enough to break her skin, even through the glove of his remaining uncorrupted hand, and forcing her to look into his eyes. Yet more split open, abstraction bleeding out of the corner of his mouth and inching up his cheekbone, down around the hook of his jaw. “Or d-d-did you forget?”
Her vision is swimming with tears as Jax forces their gazes to lock. The abstraction has overtaken half his face, one eye flanked by a handful of new ones, smaller, spinning in their sockets. But the look in his eyes, his real ones, is one of absolute anguish.
He’s in so much pain.
Then, full of venom and hatred, he hisses, “Nee-Need a remin-mind-minder, huh Pom?”
Jax stabs his inky black fingers into the gory slices in her chest, pushing into her digital tissue and curling his claws into her like he’s…
…It’s like he’s trying to dig her heart out.
…Is…Is his own so far gone that he covets hers?
Even through her cries of pain and terror, Pomni’s heart breaks for him. Even as the possibility of dying here—really dying, model torn to shreds and code corrupted by an abstracted Jax—lists toward probability, she shakily reaches a hand out to cup the side of his face still free of abstraction. Sweat-caked purple fur cards through her fingers, and all of Jax’s eyes swivel toward the contact as he stiffens under her touch.
“H-Hey,” She croaks, rubbing a thumb along his cheek. She doesn’t really know what else to say besides, “It’s okay.”
Jax’s eyes—only his true ones—widen, and he demands,
“What are y-y-you d-doing? Why a-a-are you doi-ing-ing that?”
Pomni summons a weak smile, even as she feels black blood running down her stomach and seeping into her pajama pants.
“Why…are you letting me?”
Jax bares his teeth at her, brow furrowing, but doesn’t shake her hand away.
“M-Maybe I thin-think it’s funny.”
Pomni doesn’t have the presence of mind to really push him on the matter, even though she knows—just like before when they were fighting—that he’s lying. This time, though, she knows because the spread of the oily spikes over his face and chest has slowed. He doesn’t think it’s funny to accept gentle touch he almost certainly believes he doesn’t deserve (arguably he doesn’t in this moment), because the abstraction is his biggest tell yet. It’s soothed by the touch. He’s soothed by it. He needs it, whether he wants to admit it or not. He needs this. He needs…a reminder.
“You’re not heartless, you know.”
Jax’s face bunches up in disgust at that.
“Y-You rea-rea-really want to cou-count on that?”
His claws resume their curling into her chest and Pomni gasps out, reflexively gripping his abstracted wrist. It’s freezing cold, and it makes her hand prickle with the feeling of a limb falling asleep. Her other hand stays resting stubbornly against his cheek.
“I-I know I can. Y-You…you’re human, and I am too, and you can’t f-fool me.” She hiccups around a sob as she feels a claw scrape painfully against a rib, but soldiers on: “You…can’t lie to me. I don’t…I don’t believe them anymore.”
Jax grits his teeth together.
“May-Maybe I can’t lie to you an-anymore. I ca-can still hurt you.” His gloved hand suddenly fists into her hair and yanks her head back, forcing Pomni to bare her throat with a yelp. “I-I-I want to.” And then time slows to a crawl as she feels him close his jaws around her thin, pale neck.
He’s going to rip her throat out with his teeth.
Will that be enough to kill her? Will he chew on the flesh he tears from her body, swallow her blood? Will that fill the poisonous hole he’s allowed to manifest in himself?
…It might. For a while. A moment. But…Pomni thinks his hunger runs deeper than something that can be sated with murder.
She’s not even entirely sure what her gambit is as she gulps, feeling deadly points press into her throat as it shifts under them, and shakily slides her hand from Jax’s cheek to cup the back of his head, pulling his mouth more firmly against her, forcing his sharp teeth to pierce her skin before he can bite down hard enough to do it himself. Pomni has no backup plan if Jax takes her up on her implied tacit invitation to maul her to death, but the unexpectedness of it does seem to actually make him pause, at least.
“I don’t…I don’t think you want to hurt me just because. I think…maybe…” She struggles to speak, and she can feel her own voice vibrating against Jax’s teeth pushing into her trachea. “…this is a test. You w-want to see if I’m someone who can handle you at your worst.” She pushes more firmly against the back of his head. “…So do your worst.”
Jax balks, yanking his head back and staring at her in gobsmacked, confused disbelief. She can’t differentiate her blood from the black of the abstraction staining his mouth.
“Do…Do y-y-you have a f*cking death wish, Pomn-mni? I’m n-n-not ly-lying.” He digs his claws a fraction of an inch deeper into her chest, and her throat tightens around the pain, but she stubbornly bites down on any little sounds that want to escape and holds his glare with her own determined one. “I ha-have never wanted an-an-anything more than to kill you righ-right now.”
“A-And yet I’m not dead. Gonna…gonna keep a girl waiting?” She gives him a watery but quietly bold grin, daring to push him even further when she adds, “How are you planning to make it hurt? Tell me.”
He scoffs, sounding bewildered and insulted, and it’s the most Jax he’s seemed since their fight.
“You’re insane. I’I’m the one f*cking abstr-abstra-a-acting and you’re…” He chokes the end from his sentence, and she notes his throat close around a gulp in the pause before he murmurs darkly, “…You’re play-playing a dangerous han-han-hand, Pomni.”
“If that’s what it takes to get it through that thick skull that I can handle you.” She shakily pokes a finger against his temple, then lets her hand settle against his cheek again. “Well?”
Jax’s eyes—all of them—flick down to where he’s still cruelly digging his fingers into her chest, where he still has a webbed limb of abstraction pinning her to the wall so hard she’s hardly able to touch her toes to the floor, and Pomni notes that though he doesn’t push further into her flesh, he doesn’t pull away.
“…I want to…I wan-want to pull y-your heart out of your ch-chest with my teeth, Pom.” He hesitantly brings his eyes back to hers. “I want to f-f-fee-ee-eel it bea-beating in my m-m-mouth when I b-b-bite down. I want y-y-you to…” His brows peak, and he has to swallow dryly before he can continue. “I want you to w-w-watch. I wan-wan-want to see the moment you realize-lize…I want to see it in-n-n your eyes whe-when it dawns on you tha-tha-that this is wh-what I’m capa-pable of. And…I…” His claws stiffen, but his fingers don’t dig deeper into her. His eyes drop to the floor between them. “…I want you to ha-hate me as y-y-you die.”
“…Oh…” Pomni feels a sudden sob catch in her throat. “Oh…Jax, that’s…that’s so sad.”
The baffled blinks from all his eyes indicate to Pomni that this is not the reaction he’d expected. The lens Jax views himself through is a warped one indeed, and he figures everyone sees him through same dark filter, but does he believe so deeply that he deserves to be hated that he would…that he wants to kill her just to try and prove her wrong? Is…is this really Jax’s truth?
She feels her heart fracture in her chest for him.
But…he isn’t hiding, or lying. Even if it’s misguided and twisted, it’s a truth he believes about himself and he wants her to see and acknowledge him for it. Even if he has to kill her to feel like he’s finally been understood, he still wants to be understood. By her. Maybe only by her.
But it’s still not right. Even though he might have looked at that shadow of himself for so long he believes it to be the real thing, it isn’t. He could tear her heart out with his teeth. She could hate him for killing her. He might feel some righteousness over it, some satisfaction about proving Pomni wrong, showing her the worst parts of himself and getting the response he thinks he deserves. But she knows the rabbit casting that shadow would continue to abstract if she let him have his pyrrhic victory.
Jax’s voice decrying his humanity has become so loud in his head that he can’t hear anything else. So she’ll just have to be louder.
The hand lingering on his cheek slides to catch the hook of his jaw, pulling his face close to hers, and she presses a tearful, determined kiss to his lips.
Jax freezes so stiff even the writhing of the abstraction slows to a ripple. She hears his throat shift around a dry gulp, and the fist still tangled in her hair from when he’d threatened to rip her throat out loosens its grip completely in favor of covering the back of her hand pressed to his face. It’s gentle but insistent when he pulls her hand away from his cheek and leans back, breaking the kiss now that Pomni isn’t holding him in place. All of his technicolor eyes are staring at her, not so much as twitching in their sockets as a series of complex feelings cross his expression, and the one Pomni can most clearly pick out is confusion. The pointed daggers Jax has for fingers on his abstracted side finally slide from the sliced white flesh of Pomni’s chest, and there’s a wave of relief at the lessened pain that washes over her so suddenly it nearly makes her dizzy.
“…Why did you do that?”
It doesn’t escape Pomni’s notice that his question is free from glitches.
“Because you’re wrong.” She manages a little smirk, even as the cold air begins to settle on the open wounds along her sternum and causes her to start shivering. “You think you don’t deserve to feel human anymore.”
“I don’t.” The words are so quick to leave his mouth. His eyes flick down to the state of the torn up skin of her chest, and for the first time ever she sees remorse weigh down his features. “Would…would a human do this? To someone who’s only trying to—” He bites down on the rest of his sentence, shaking his head. “Jesus, Pomni. Just admit that I’m a godd*mn monster. See reason.”
Her little smirk grows more confident.
“Sounds to me like I was right. You want me to see you at your worst, you’re just expecting me to hate you for it. But I can handle you, whether you like it or not.”
“You can’t fix me.” He spits out with a scowl, like it’s a challenge she’s issued.
“I’m not trying to.”
Jax stiffens again at her sure, even tone, head tilting before he scoffs at her again.
“Well, sh*t, Pom, what are you trying to do, then?”
“Prove you wrong.” Her expression softens. “Convince you that even at your worst, you’re still a human, and you still need humans.”
“I don’t need you. I don’t need that.”
“Prove it,” She challenges. “You still want to tear my heart out of my chest and eat it in front of me? Do it.” Pomni swears she sees Jax balk. “Do your worst, Jax.”
There’s a long pause. Pomni doesn’t so much as blink as she stares Jax down, then a little cry of surprise escapes her as he all at once retracts the abstraction he’d been using to hold her in place against the wall. She starts to waver, legs unable to bear her weight after the burden of standing without being pinned up is suddenly upon them again, but Jax catches her in the crook of his uncorrupted arm.
“Don’t say anything you’re gonna regret.”
She blinks up at him a little blearily, but still holds her mouth in a smirk.
“You planning on doing something to make me regret saying things?”
“F*cking maybe.” He growls, refusing to meet her eyes. “Pomni, there’s…you’re not safe, d*mn it. I just—I need to hurt you, or something.”
Pomni distantly recalls Kaufmo raging through the halls of the circus, beating Ragatha nearly to death with a singlemindedness that reflected the level of obsession that had driven him to abstraction. She chews on her lip. By the time she’d been introduced to Kaufmo, he’d fully succumbed to the abstraction, but, are there stages? Jax is still half a rabbit and fully cognizant (if a little more dangerous than usual). There’s a lot about abstraction she (or anyone else, probably) doesn’t understand, and there’s a lot about Jax’s particular abstraction she can only guess at, but…if her hunch is right…
“Does it have to be hurting me?”
Jax clicks his tongue disdainfully, still not meeting her eyes.
“Was the rundown of my list of unhinged murderous desires not clear enough?”
“Jax,” She reaches up from where she’s still held in the crook of his arm and puts both her hands on his face (her left one tingles under the abstraction around his one eye socket) and pulls his head down to force him to lock his gaze with hers. She throws yet another reckless ultimatum at him, because they’re working. “I’m still bleeding, here. Still hurts like a motherf*cker. Either keep hurting me until I die or do something else to me to feel alive.”
Pomni catches the pupils of his original pair of eyes waver and flick over her once, then hurriedly glance away. It’s hard to see in the dim ambience of the burrow, especially past the glow of the multicolored, ever-shifting eyes split open over half his face, but there’s an undeniable flush crossing Jax’s cheekbones.
“…You can’t just say something like that to a guy on the edge when you have your tits out, Pom.”
Her brow knits. Glancing down, sure enough, the bloodied pajama shirt he’d sliced clean down the middle when he first raked his claws down her sternum is sitting torn open to either side of her little breasts. They’re hardly visible through all the black blood beginning to cake around the open wounds, though. She hasn’t spared her tits a thought since Jax started tearing into her flesh between them.
But this means her hunch is right. She digs in her heels.
“So meeting any base human inclination will calm your abstraction down.”
Jax gives another gobsmacked scoff, brow arching incredulously and eyes still stubbornly pointed away from her, but the dark flush under his fur redoubles.
“You’re insane. You don’t want that. With me. Like this. Here. You don’t want that with me, like this, here.”
“I kissed you, didn’t I? It felt human, didn’t it? The abstraction hasn’t spread further since, has it? Jax!” She rattles his head in her grip a little. “Just look at me, d*mnit!”
All his eyes swivel to her at once in a glare that she’d be lying if she said didn’t startle her just a little.
“Don’t say anything you’re gonna regret, Pomni. You look at me for a second, will ya?” His teeth grit together. “What even is your end goal here? It’s not like I’m not a dead man walking, anyway, and I’m not some make-a-wish case crying out for deathbed pussy.”
“Oh my god, you look at you for a second! The abstraction has hardly spread in the last five minutes. Do you know for a fact that this isn’t reversible? Why does it have to be…” Pomni scrubs at her face before crossing her arms stubbornly. “…deathbed pussy?” Then, in a scandalized grumble, eyes flicking away, “You’re the one bringing up pussy, anyway.”
Jax’s mouth opens and closes, glow from the eyes in his throat casting across her skin in blinks as he does. He glances away from her, blush redoubling yet again.
“…Shouldn’t…shouldn’t you be more focused on not having holes in your chest than trying to charm the dungarees off the half-abstracted bastard who put them there? Or are you that kind of freaky?”
Pomni huffs out a chuckle. He’s trying to get a rise out of her, that’s a good sign. She softens, reaching a hand up to touch his cheek again, asking tacitly for his gaze, which he gives after a moment.
“If we can get you feeling human enough that the abstraction doesn’t have a foothold in you anymore, we can talk about my kinks.”
She catches Jax gulp, and it seems like a nervous one.
“…Not to put too fine a point on kink negotiation but—ugh, no, okay, Pom. Listen,” He wilts around an exhale and Pomni immediately perks her ears up at his shift in tone. The hundred eyes dotting his face and chest and arm all begin to twitch and swivel. “If you stay, I…I’m probably going to hurt you more. You knocked me for a loop with stealing that kiss but I tasted blood and if…if we’re…” He rubs at the back of his neck with his free hand, the one not still looped around the small of Pomni’s back to hold her weight against him.
“If we’re…?” She prompts gently. Jax huffs.
“If we’re…talking about…trying to reverse this via…base…carnal sh*t. Obviously I’m pretty f*cked up and there’s…some drive overlap happening.” He glances back to her, the only pair of eyes holding steady as the abstraction begins to shift agitatedly. “…I still really want to swing hard to the other end of the gamut and maul you to death. My wires might get crossed if you’re too good a kisser, Pom.” He scrubs at his face, and the series of multicolored eyeballs clinging to his cheekbone all blink reflexively. He flicks his gaze back to hers and there’s a blush under his fur again, paired with a deflective smirk she can recognize easily now. “I’m flattered you’re so eager to be indecent if it’s for the cause.” He glances down to the cuts on her chest. “But it might not work. If you sense a tipping point, I want you to run. Leave me here. Lock my door. And…and g-get Caine.”
“But! But, Jax…” She weakly protests.
“Hey,” Jax ducks his head down next to hers and presses an unexpected, chaste kiss to her mouth, keeping their foreheads lightly touching when he says, “I can’t give you a night to remember if you’re dead at the end of it.”
She scoffs, bewildered.
“Wow, what a flirt.”
“The best of my class.” He nudges his face against hers, like he’s trying to burrow under her chin. “Please, Pom.”
Her throat tightens and she swallows thickly. She’s never heard him say please.
“…Okay.”
The eyes studding the abstraction that’s overtaken half of him all flutter shut as he wilts in an exhale against her collarbones.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” She presses a hand to his cheek and lifts his head to meet her gaze again. “Because when this works and you’re not abstracting anymore, we are going to have a long, uncomfortable talk.”
He actually pouts.
“Sell me harder on abstracting, why don’t you?”