Chapter Text
!NOT A SHIP!
The void. The void groaned. It writhed around her body just as she writhed in its grip.
It was alive and it wailed.
The void was vast. It was reoccurring. It was everything Ashlyn knew of the circus, lest the snippets that she couldn’t for the life of her put together. For example, her most recent breach. She ended up in a noir themed bar and only got a greeting in before she was yanked back to her pale, vast prison. Then, not much longer after, she was in front of a microphone at a baseball game.
How could a baseball game and a bar be connected? The two events just seemed so... aimless.
She’d tried to connect herself to the situation without any context clues every time, to go along with it, just to evade the eyes of the thing that kept her here and have a goddamned conversation, but it knew.
She’d tried so, so hard to get the others to notice her humanity. A cowboy hat was really the only thing that she could conjure up with the lack of inspiration the void withheld. Faint conversations kept her entertained between her floating thoughts. Some got louder as the others became aggravated with each other, or if they conversed about deeper, moral topics. The conversations 'Kinger' engaged were always deafening. The conversations 'Jax' had with himself after the circus lights went out seemed as if they were within Ashlyn's mind.
Memories drifted in and out of her thoughts slowly now. One came in, and before she could even process it, the thought was gone and the new one had no context to go off of. Her brain felt immensely slow. How long had she been here? It was hard to tell, but it was long enough to begin to remember things about her life.
Like her name. Ashlyn.
Her job at Caine & Abel.
Soon enough, Abel himself, the kind old man who didn't shut up about his daughter and her obsession with her mother's arachnid collection.
Her interview to get the job as an intern looking for a new rung in the tech world.
She didn't mean to end up here. Who did?
Her family.
Her mother.
Feeling things other than coldness were weird in here. The thought of her mother made her levitating body curl over and crumple down lowering the endless space, like the heaviness on her heart had made her mass greaten. Her neck separated from her chest as the wood splintered and morphed into a tight knot before her (non existent) eyes. A silent scream tore from her throat, joined by ragged breaths and panicked whimpers that were not her own.
With a not so satisfying pop and a horrific screech, her red body materialised on a classy toilet seat in a tiny cubicle. Her red body materialised, wooden and stiff, onto a porcelain toilet seat in a cramped cubicle. Pain flared as she stood, flushed the toilet on instinct, and braced for the void’s inevitable pull.
She pushed the door open, emerging from the bathroom store to see a very flustered and sweaty purple rabbit clutching onto the sink, glaring at himself in pure hatred as his eyes glitched.
"Sorry," Ashlyn trembled, remaining still, continuously bracing for the inevitable rip back to purgortory.
A glare and sharp scoff left Jax as he straightened himself up in the mirror and ran his hand over his head, his ears flattening and staying flat. He'd almost lost his [s#!+], and now this useless NPC was giving him trouble? Caine was really out to get him, huh? He slammed the tap off and looked back at the mirror.
"Oh, fantastic,” Jax sneered. “My breakdown has front-row seats.”
She said nothing, swallowing the hollow weight pressing down.
He looked her over. "Aren't you going to- disappear?" He asked the very still and silent wood doll behind him..
Ashlyn blinked, voice barely a whisper. “I don’t… know.”
He turned back to Ashlyn, his pupils returning to relaxed squared, grateful he had something to direct his hatred towards. “Well, go ahead. Say something cryptic before you vanish. I’m in the mood for a riddle.”
Jax scoffed at the continued silence, shoving the bathroom door open, eyes flicking down the dimly lit hall to check the coast was clear of the others. “Well, no disappearing acts just yet. Let’s take this little performance somewhere with a better audience.”
Ashlyn followed silently as Jax strode out, the circus air similar to the Void's. Stale and recycled. The low hum of flickering fluorescent lights overhead was welcomed, however. It was a nice change from pure and utter silence.
Ashlyn walked slow behind Jax, getting used to her material legs against flooring. Who knew floating for most of the time made your hips hurt so badly?
"Who even votes for these awards, anyway? You NPCs?' He asked, giving Ashlyn another annoyed glance. "Why are you even out of the crowd?"
Ashlyn finally spoke, her voice small and strained. "I'm not a computer." She insisted.
"Sure. Sure." Jax laughed meanly, opening the door to the theatre.
At the sight of the abomination of teeth and eyes and red silk, her skeleton was taken first. Or at least it felt like that.
Ashlyn didn’t scream. She couldn’t. The air caught in her throat like static, as if the world had paused just to watch her come undone.
Something inside her shifted, not her skin or limbs, but deeper. The feeling of structure, of shape, of being held together. It was as if the void had reached in with invisible hands and started unraveling her from the inside out.
A strange lightness bloomed in her chest, hollow and dizzying. Her legs buckled. Her arms hung wrong.
It didn’t hurt, not exactly. It was even satisfying, the pain in her wooden hips just... gone. But the wrongness of it made her want to claw her way back into herself, to scoop herself back together.
And then came the silence. Thick, expectant. The kind of silence that settles just before something ends. The hall faded to glitching white.
Freedom was fun while it lasted.
She felt like it herself.
It could not wander, it could not wonder, it could not belong. It could merely be.