Chapter Text
“What would you do if I abstracted tomorrow?”
Pomni burned holes into Jax’s back with her glassy polymer eyes. Rememberance’s cold fingers danced down his spine, as if puppeteered by her gaze, sending a sickly shock through him. Bitter memories crept out of their cages and threatened to swallow him whole. The silence between them in that moment thrummed with a palpable tension; the air was leaden and thick. The only thing that perturbed it was the voice-box breathing of the jester behind him. He knew he had wound her too tight, and she now popped out of her musical box. The thrill of anticipation got to him, now his mind was reeling at the task of shoving her back inside the box again. This was part of the mechanical practice of shoving his wandering heart back into its cage– pushing things until they broke. It was a sure-proof way to ensure nothing came close. He turned to face her as if he were pulled passively by strings, a puppet to his ego, looking into her pinwheel eyes, seeing nothing behind them but zeros and ones. Play time was over, it was time to put Pomni back into her box.
“I’d move on.” He stood straighter now, forcing his mind into a simulated calmness, meeting Pomni’s perturbed expression with invisible strings pulling the corners of his mouth into a half-moon grin, “And probably forget about you.”
As soon as he said those words, Pomni’s face drained of all emotion– save her eyes. Those pinwheels spun and danced across his frame, seemingly picking apart the very fabric of his being. They searched for an answer that wasn’t there. It was lost a long time ago.
Pop goes the weasel, Jax thought to himself– half as a joke, half as a prayer that the silence would end. Infinity compressed into a matter of seconds when she stared at him, her carousel stare giving him vertigo. A million foreign emotions raced behind her eyes and twitched across her features. It felt like watching endless whirling waves in a dark sea with their foreign and undefinable nature. At least, that’s what he wants to think. Yet, he knows those waters– he knows those eyes– even if he lost the capacity to define them long ago. No matter how much Jax tries to shove it down, deja vu held him in a vice grip as he looked down at her.
“Okay,” she choked out a quiet rasp. Her gaze flitted across the ground, every thought whirling around her head clearly on display, “Okay. I understand.”
Jax was gobsmacked by her pitiful expression. Honestly, he didn’t know what he expected when those words drifted out from between his lips; but he didn’t expect the blank doll-like expression painted upon Pomni’s face now. He anxiously needed something to fill the silence. He wanted her to scream, to cry, to tear him apart– but all he got was a stillness that made his skin crawl. There was a clear line in the sand to what they had, and she crossed it. Pomni doesn’t know him, and he doesn’t know Pomni. They’ve never seen each other's scars, known the curves of each other's smile or even looked each other in the eyes. Yet the ghost of her smile seemed to linger on her face where an unnamed expression painted itself now. No, not painted– generated. Not painted. He told himself, Those circled and lines fixed into a vague frown are just symbols, clanker slop that a computer calls art.
Pomni wasn’t something crafted by real hands, that frown wasn’t pulled by the strings of a real soul. Generally, though, humans tend not to be painted pieces. They’re messy, terrible creatures. The abstract way in which the spirit awkwardly wretches us about is a trademark of the flesh, and behind her eyes danced something obscure and unnamed– the ugly cries of a restless soul crushing and clawing the ones and zeros to break through. Something real fixed its shaky, miserable gaze on him, fixing its aim dead between the eyes. The intensity of her stare nearly made him crack, his mind a whirlwind of emotion, each one moving so quickly it seemed to slip between his fingers before he could name it– so he opted to stare blankly at her plastic hat.
It felt more like he was at gunpoint now than it did when she actually had the barrel fixed on his fur ridden skull, with the way his stomach churned. It tread on the line of uncanny to see her large, vibrant cartoonish eyes wrought with the burden of complex emotion. His conscience raked its jagged nails across his brain as he stared at her, his smile falling as he tried to push back against it. Her bloated plastic head seemed to drive her body to a limp pivot, like a balloon tugging a string, turning away from him. Jax studied her figure, searching for some semblance of anything he could grab onto, hoping to get a rise out of her.
C’mon, get angry, curse me out, cry and run away, tell me I’m an asshole, just something.
The silence left him to sit with the foul taste from his words that sat heavy in his mouth. His stomach bubbled over and the acid left his throat burning. Suddenly, he saw Pomni clutching her gun tightly with a shaky hand. Something to grab onto. The thought of her preparing to shoot him brought a modicum of relief. And a blind flash of annoyance.
Did she really think she could fix me?
A raspy laugh broke free from behind Jax’s yellowed teeth– more akin to a choke than a laugh. He then clicked his tongue, petulantly jamming his hands into his pockets.
“Jeez,” He scoffs, “You really can’t take a–”
Pomni pressed the tip of the gun to her temple.
And before he could grasp what was going on, before he had a moment to think, there was a deafening bang that sucked all the air out of the room.
“Joke,” he choked out with a breath, the shock forcing up the air that sat like lead in his larynx.
He blinked and confetti swirled where Pomni's head was moments before. Her arm still held the gun poised upward. Still. Hauntingly still. His words hung bitterly suspended in the air. Every fiber of his being began to shake. Hot tears threatened to well up and spill over. His heart threatened to tear out of his chest as it slammed itself against its cage. Acid seared his larynx. His mind went blank, filled with something white and scalding and relentless, the only words he was capable of conjuring up were: it’s not real.
What was left of Pomni’s body went limp and fell to the floor with a gruesome thud. The little pieces of confetti followed suit, floating down and gently caressing her corpse. Her body now shrouded in ridiculous colored paper like flowers for a burial. It’s not real. He repeated like a mantra in his mind until the meaning of those words wore out like an old sweater, all value disintegrating with each uttered syllable and frantic breath. His eyes darted across the room, scouring every corner with his inky irises. He waited for Pomni to pop out of somewhere, or for Caine to place a dunce cap on his head and whisk him over to the corner (which has happened before because his sensitivity programming probably hasn’t been updated since the year 2000.) This place isn’t real, you can’t take it seriously. It’s all a big fucking joke. The punchline seemed to go over his head on this one, though. In vain, he still searched for the gag, eyes frantically darting around the room, not willing to admit that the punchline was him all along. The gossamer spindles of his nervous system felt like they were being ripped out of his skin in his search, setting the sinew beneath ablaze.
“It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not–” His manic chant came to a halt as his gaze drifted down to meet his involuntarily outstretched hand. He had tried to reach her.
Within that terse breath of realization, the world around him began to corrode and corrupt. The very fabric of his reality began to shred– each thread that snapped a different colored neon panel that slowly encroached on his darkening vision until all he could see was thin lines of blinding colors, as if his head were a TV with the screen bashed in. It’s what he felt like, the way his head reeled with the screaming colors he couldn’t escape. He was trapped– paralyzed and helpless– unable to block out the chromatic disintegration of his sanity or the deafening, stinging ringing in his ear. No matter how tightly he clutched at his ears or wretched his eyes shut. All he could do was witness the pain in terror, curled into a ball like a small child, his heart slamming itself against the cage of his ribs as his lungs desperately heaved in search of air they were deprived of.
Then, everything went black. Every stimuli that overwhelmed his nerves and picked them apart suddenly vanished, leaving him wholly deprived of feeling. Silence smothered him with its uncanny stillness. It was as if he were in a vacuum chamber, all sensation sucked out of him. He was grateful, partially, when he could make out the sound of his own labored breathing– distorted and compressed like it was coming through a radiogram. It was almost deafening as it sliced through the tungsten silence that crushed him. His eyes were leaden, sealed shut with their own impossible weariness, yet he fought to pry them open regardless. His vision was impossibly blurry at first, he strained to blink it away. The blotchy blurs of grey and brown began to take form and his other senses slowly began to return.
Jax found himself slumped on a dilapidated wooden chair at the end of an old wooden kitchen table, awkwardly balanced on two of its four uneven pegs. It clunked against the ground as he shifted, the chair finally choosing a way to lean. The sound made him flinch, he would have jumped out of his skin if he were capable of moving more than an inch. However, he found himself paralysed there, gripping onto the old wood of his seat fiercely as he tried to make out his surroundings. He didn't know where he was, but it all felt so… familiar. The smell of must and smoke, the harsh streams of sterile white street lights proliferating through the blinds and across his lap, the cracked tile floor ridden with ornate, tacky patterns beneath his feet. Nostalgia for something he couldn’t quite recall; it was a memory that blurred over time and began to feel more like a concept of a place than a reality.
He finally gained the gumption to raise his head, neck straining with weight. His eyes strained in the light proliferating through the blinds on the window; illuminating the linoleum countertop, glinting on the sink below covered in hard water. A graveyard of flies on the sill doused in a beam of that harsh light, killed in their futile pursuit of trying to reach its source. Jax thought about their once buzzing bodies throwing themselves against the glass over and over again, only to kill themselves in the process. The bustle of a city without sound could be vaguely seen through the cracks in the blinds. The light faded periodically, shadows of forms dancing through the blinds and across the room. They danced across the face of the pale figure across from him.
“Hey.” He spat, though it came out as more of a raspy whisper. He concentrated his efforts on focusing on the pale figure’s face, his vision still yet to clear. Slowly, he began to make out the face of the figure.
His throat grew dry and all the blood drained from his brain, pooling in his feet. Vertigo seemed to smother every fiber of his being, leeching on his lifeblood like a parasite. Jax's breath grew ragged and desperate. He could feel the sticky, rancid smell of death creep behind his eyes and gnaw at his brain. The pale woman across from him was a corpse propped up on the kitchen chair across from him. Crimson splattered across her face and painted her white blouse, a gaping bullet hole wound running from one side of her head to the other. The hot blood tangled itself in her hair as well; thick clots matted her skewed bob, wayward strands forming a halo around her lowered head. She held a smoking gun with a limp grip in her left hand, folded neatly in her lap as if it were placed there. The corpse’s eyes held a bitter coldness, half-moon eyes framed by thick lashes cast their melancholic gaze to the tile floor. Her face was much like a porcelain doll: blank and distant. A serene expression danced across her face, no soul pulling the strings behind it anymore.
Bile brewed fiercely in his stomach, burning his throat as he dry heaved into his hand.
As if the noise somehow snatched her from the jaws of death, her eyes twitched open, void to meet his gaze. Mortified, Jax couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Any screams were strangled and died in his throat. The only thing he could do was feel the savage beating of his heart as the woman’s glassy, lifeless eyes bore into him. Her eyes, wide and round like the moon, pierced through the very marrow of his bones. He found he couldn’t look away. The woman’s head promptly jerked up to follow her gaze as if being yanked by invisible strings, blood gushing from the wound out of the side of her head. Jax tried to fight his way out of his chair, tried to run away- but he was paralyzed, like a fly stuck in a trap, left to writhe in the feeling of every wretched string of sinew in his body being set on fire in his terror. The corpse only sat there and stared at him with an eerily familiar gaze, blood trickling out the side of her head, hands folded neatly in her lap as if nothing were wrong.
Pomni's distorted voice rang out in all directions, pitched down and mechanically cruel, "When’s the last time you called your mother?"
Jax recoiled, a sudden remembrance and shock seizing him simultaneously. Her words rang around in his head like a dissonant echo, filling up every neuron he had with regret like a knife to the skull. Her stony gaze continued to dig itself under his skin, and he had no other choice but to meet it, unable to tear himself away. He couldn’t remember his mother’s face anymore, the memory of her voice was muddled and distant. He clung onto the memory of her warmth, the memory of pressing his face into her cold arm on a hot day, the memory of when she held him the scent of lavender held him too. Though, now, those memories seemed to scald him as burning tears ran down his face. He had tried so long to bury that sorrow– but now, it came alive again, reanimated by the corpse of a stranger but the voice of a friend.
"Do you know where your mother is? Do you know how m-m-m-much pain she's in?" Her voice grew louder, breaking the walls and windows of the apartment, sending them crumbling down into an inky black void. A scream ripped through his ribs with enough force to shatter them. He clutched his head, raking gloved hands through his fur, tugging at his ears to try and get the swirling thoughts to silence amidst his absurd surroundings. Pomni's form distorted into a malevolent poltergeist, a corrupted version of herself that grew into a Goliath hunched over him, hands poised to crush him.
All of it glitched out in an instant and Pomni’s lifeless form was eerily sterile once more– her plastic jester body laid in front of him like a barbie doll a petulant child ripped the head off of. A hollow symbol of a gruesome reality. The sight both sickened him and filled him with unbridled rage. He gagged, clutching his stomach and crumpling into himself pathetically, falling to Pomni’s side in a hysterical heap. Gravity became too much to bare. The walls threatened to close in on him, topple under the weight of eternity– Jax’s head was reeling.
Then, she was gone with a cartoonish pop.
No, he whispered under his breath hysterically, No, this wasn’t supposed to happen. He desperately clawed at where her body once was.
Golden words illuminated above his head, washing him in their sickly yellow glow: “WINNER! WINNER! WINNER!” The sound of tiny plastic trumpets played and those manic whispers erupted into screams as he desperately clutched at his head, retching sobs from the depths of his two-dimensional being. In a blind rage he clung onto the shining, golden letters and threw them against the ground with all the sheer force he had, shattering them on impact like glass. Angry, hot tears streamed down his face and down his neck. One by one, he tore them down, leaving him to stare at the wreckage once he was done. He was left feeling sucked dry– with the sting in his muscles, an aching back, and a sticky, wet face. He looked down at a shard at his feet, and an unfamiliar figure stared back at him. His fur, usually plastered down to his head, was wild and ragged. His eyes looked weary and worried, his ears bent and crooked. The rage and pain faded away, and the only thing he could feel now was a numb disappointment. He let out a heavy, broken sigh.
“God, you look stupid.”
************************
Pomni was plunged into inky darkness, her breath punched out of her chest. All of her limbs were tingly and numb as she floated through an infinite void for what felt like eternity. She melted into infinity, felt her soul weld with everything– left to linger in all the forms of what she once was, forever closed off to what she would have been. Her mind began to consume itself with an unmistakable dread, and that hunger for life lit her mind aflame. She fought through the abyss, though her limbs were foreign islands and her nerves gossamer strings floating away from where they once were braided into her sinew, she grasped at the pieces of herself. Cording them together in the abyss, blindly knitting her form in a realm of infinite pandemonium, she finally found exodus– a pinhole light that she frantically swam towards, her movements jumbled and awkward as she dragged the pieces of herself to it. As she got closer, light revealed the miscellaneous contents of the void– lamps, babydolls, toasters, portraits, old computers, cellphones, a house, a bed, a toy rabbit– all of which floated without aim or purpose. Pomni couldn’t recognize them all individually as once one object collided with another, they morphed into something new– each in an eternal state of change. Nothing was ever constant. As she entered the white tear in the void, the fabric of her being stitched together.
Sensation struck her suddenly– cold, hard winds ate her whole and left her shivering. She stood in the middle of an alabaster expanse, snow covering every inch of flat land from horizon to horizon to horizon. Miscellaneous objects sat askew in the snow, as if they too fell out of the void and into this expanse by chance: A small statue of a sphinx laid a few feet away from her. A giant copy of Frankenstein stood tall in the distance, fingers of wind flipping through its pages. An uncanny, seven foot tall, purple rabbit darted across the frozen tundra, seemingly running from the gaze of a massive clay moon– grimacing in pain from the rocket in his eye. It was nothing like the one she knew, this one was entirely realistic, every detail so impossibly life-like no game dev could ever hope to replicate it. The rabbit stopped running to stare her in the eyes for a moment, those blank eyes held nothing but a hunger for survival. Its nose twitched, followed by its left ear, then it continued running. A booming laugh rang out, reverberating off invisible walls. A man stood beside her– how’d she not notice? He towered over her, donned in a long, dark coat and a cap to match. Within his salt and pepper beard, he pursed a cigarette in his lips. He spared a glance down to her from the corner of his eye.
“Отродясь такого не было, и вот опять.” The man’s voice rang out in all directions, his tone drenched in recollection and surrender. Pomni scrunched up her face, trying to decipher whether or not she was just concussed or the man was speaking Russian to her. She met the man’s expectant gaze on her and realized the words he spoke were spelled out in the plume of smoke that circled him.
This has never happened before, yet here we are again
He fixed his gaze back on the horizon. Pomni followed it. The moon had doubled in size over the course of that minute, and she was struck with the realization that it was going to crash into the tundra. She tried to move desperately, but found her feet were frozen into the ground. No matter how hard she pulled, the ice wouldn’t give. The man’s feet were frozen into the ground as well. Panic sunk into her chest and hardened, leaving her with a hopelessness that made her limbs turn into tungsten.
“When can I catch a break,” Pomni groaned, her voice sounding so small compared to the man beside her.
“Когда рак на горе свистнет,” his scoff formed another plume of smoke, rising in the air, proliferating out from between his lips and forming a halo around his head.
When a crawfish whistles in the mountain.
The ground rumbled fiercely, consuming the entire horizon. Muffled screams could be heard from all around. The man only clicked his tongue and rifled through his pockets, pulling out a box of cigarettes, smoke leaking out from the folds in the cardboard. Smoke embraced them both in its stinging embrace as he opened the box and plucked one of the already lit cigarettes out. He offered it to her, and Pomni took it with shivering hands. She held it between pursed lips and sucked in the warmth, relishing in the burn that filled her lungs.
“I’m an idiot. Why do I always look for things that aren’t there? I don’t understand.” The words puffed out of her lips before she even knew what she was saying, as if her tongue had a mind of its own. Words just spilled out of her mouth without any control, but the smoke brought her a sense of unmistakable calm as her impending doom surged closer, “I do all of this… caring… just to end up here, with a gun wound in my head and an indifferent rabbit I tried to turn into a man. All I do is waste time on abandoned things, but I never know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Memories that felt so incredibly distant began to creep back into her mind– the disappointment on her parents faces she could see clear as day through the rearview mirror. They drove in a heavy silence, with a tension that still sat heavy on her shoulders. She felt so small in the back seat of that car– she was so lost at nineteen years old that she ended up bruised and beaten in the back of a cop car. Yet, somehow being in the car with her parents felt more like punishment than anything the cop threatened her with.
“I’m still lost, even after all these years.”
The man beside her nodded sincerely, donning perplexed eyes on his otherwise stoic face, pressing a finger to his chin as he studied the purple rabbit darting across the tundra.
"Человек — это тайна. Ее надо разгадать, и ежели будешь ее разгадывать всю жизнь, то не говори, что потерял время; я занимаюсь этой тайной, ибо хочу быть человеком.” The plumes of words wrapped around him like a scarf, Pomni traced the swirling script carefully, soaking up every word as if her life depended on it.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
His words wrapped around her in a warm embrace– literally and figuratively. Each vowel and consonant brought her comfort as the moon ripped through the icy climes, rapidly approaching where they stood.
“Удачи тебе, солнца тебе, трудностей тебе, Pomni.” The man said, the plumes of smoke dissipating from the vibrations.
“Can you turn the subtitles back on? I can’t speak Russian,” She giggled.
“You are speaking it right now, though,” He said, a warm grin forming ripples of wrinkles on his face– a priceless tapestry that only came with age. It was something Pomni longed for. The moon opened its gargantuan jaw and swallowed the both of them whole, and Pomni found herself hurtling through the abyss once more, this time ripping through the space so aggressively she felt herself slipping from consciousness.
************************
Pomni blinked and her head popped into the loser room, falling to the ground and bouncing like a basketball. Consequently, making the hollow plunking sound of one, too, as she bounced up and down, up and down. Her vision jerked around and she felt her brain was rattling within her rubbery skull, bouncing around manically like a bitterly caged monkey. Ragatha let out a gasp and ran to save Pomni from a larger migraine than she already had. Zooble and Gangle only stared wide-eyed, too shocked to know how to respond. Ragatha, though, dropped her at first, letting her slip through the clutches of her raggedy hands. Ragatha frantically fumbled for her a few times, and before Ragatha could succeed Pomni bounced flat on her face, leaving her brain thoroughly scrambled.
“Oh my God, Pomni! Are you okay?” She said, her fabric face scrunched up in worry.
“Опять мне кажется, что кружится моя голова” Pomni muttered in a daze, blinking her left eye slowly then her right.
Ragatha looked at her worriedly for a moment, then her anger overcame her pity. She exclaimed, “I can’t believe Jax would do that to you just so he could win! Ugh, what a massive JERK! How could he do this? I mean you both had already–”
Pomni somewhat gained a modicum of coherent thought as she looked up as Ragatha trailed on, feeling much like a baby being cradled in her mother’s arms. I don’t know Russian… she thought to herself, the realization suddenly striking her with a sobering slap to the face.
“What the !@#$% I don’t know Russian?!?!” Pomni reeled for a moment. Maybe the bullet really scrambled her brain– Oh. Right. Pomni was suddenly hit with the reality of what had just happened moments before.
The cold metal of the gun poised against her temple, the inescapable numbness that she had known years ago coming back to fasten its claws into old scars. From its old perch, it whispered in her ears the same things it used to. She’s an easy target now that there’s nowhere else to run to. Though, she thought she’d finally be rid of it as there’s no way to get a say over her own death anymore. Is this really the final place I ran to? A certain empty, yellow grin flashed across the forefront of her mind, and she shook away the question. She knows her mind, she’ll stay stuck in that mud like existential dread forever if she doesn’t break herself out of it. Jax is a living, breathing example that there’s always some way of running from your fears, so maybe not.
“Pomni?” Ragatha’s worry-ridden stare ripped Pomni from her spiralling thoughts. Pomni blinked at her, taking in her scrunched felt brow, and the warmth of her plush hands. Ragatha had the habit of shifting her weight from her right foot to her left for when she is trying to comfort herself or she’s lost in thought. It was a simple motion, swaying back and forth, but Pomni found that it lulled her mind into silence. Pomni thought about all the years she had probably had that habit, it was probably something forged in childhood of constantly trying to please a forever disappointed mother. Pomni knew how that felt. She was washed in gratitude, and a warm smile crept upon her face.
“Thank you, Rags.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t really do anything much– Anyways, I’m sorry for talking so much. What happened?”
Pomni’s mouth opened for a moment as she hesitated, then closed, battling with the notion of telling her. What happened rang in her mind like a gong, snapping her out of the comfort she previously found back into a whirlpool of spiraling thoughts. Why did she do that? To prove a point that she wasn’t just his ‘play thing’? I’m an adult, I know how to take care of a situation. That wasn’t fair to Jax, even if he is an asshole. A feeling of guilt and anger pooled in her stomach. What was I thinking? She scraped at her memory, remembering how her mind was alight with rage and bitter resignation, how that numbing darkness sunk its claws into her and sang its old promises of escape in her ear. It was so loud. She remembered staring at her reflection in the barrel of the gun: one set of pinwheel eyes locked with another distorted set, Jax a watercolor smudge of purple in the background. It’s digital. What’s the harm? She remembers thinking. But now that the dust has settled, and her mind burned through all its kindling, she gained clarity. She remembered a gangly purple blur reaching for the gun in her hand, a face unwillingly twisted with hurt. You know what the harm is. You know. She opted to just stay silent and averted her gaze over to the aquarium that washed the room in a cerulean blue. She let her mind go blank, focusing on the feeling of swaying, imagining she was sailing to calm herself down.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. All this was… a lot.” Ragatha spoke softly, and with such care. Her voice felt like a hug at that moment. Pomni looked back up at Ragatha, and it looked as if something clicked behind her eyes, piecing two and two together. Pomni didn’t realize she was that transparent. Maybe Ragatha was just good at reading her now. “But, I would love to talk to you… once we find where your body is.”
“Oh yeah, right.” Pomni said, suddenly remembering the lower half of her body was gone. ‘Lower half’ because half of her body is her head. Instead of worrying about where it was, she enjoyed having someone else lug around her massive head for a moment.
“Oh Hi Pomni!” Kinger piped in cheerfully, just now realizing she was there, “Where’s the rest of you?”
Suddenly, as if on cue, her body clipped into the room, tearing her out of the downward spiral of her thoughts. Her multi-colored torso glitched through the walls, her arms following limply, and clipped all around the room. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the multi-colored gangly limbs slingshotting themselves from wall to wall. Pomni stared at it and exasperatedly sighed. This continued for a few moments before finally ricocheting off a wall and back to her. It hit her violently, sending both her and Ragatha toppling over. “STRIKE!” appeared in big neon letters above their heads as they both laid there in a pile on the floor, groaning.
“There it is.” Zooble chided.
“Oh! Thanks, Zooble.” Kinger exclaimed.
“Yeah, thanks Zooble I didn’t see it,” Pomni retorted while grunting in pain, her familiar back pain doubled in magnitude. She curled up into a little ball beside Ragatha.
“Ragatha, are you okay?” she grumbled, head reeling.
Ragatha looked at her and blinked for a moment, an unreadable expression dancing across her plush face, then she offered up her usual lop-sided smile. It was different, though– softer and less forced.
“Oh, I’m just fine. I should be asking–” Ragatha shook her head, as if clearing it like an etch-a-sketch, “Are you okay? ”
“I mean, I have a little migraine. And back pain. But other than that, yeah, I’m okay,” Pomni mustered up a feeble smile, massaging one of her temples with a gloved hand. They helped each other to their feet. Pomni struggled a bit getting up, trying to regain feeling in her digital limbs as pins and needles shot through her as she tried to move. It felt like trying to swim 6 feet under the sahara, and every movement elicited a groan from her. Eventually, though, with the help of Ragatha she got to her feet. Only for her head to then pop off again and roll off to Zooble’s feet. Pomni let out a muffled groan face down on the floor as her body searched blindly for her head.
“Welcome to a day in my life,” Zooble sighed, picking up Pomni’s head and wobbling over to her body, aggressively screwing her head back on right with expertise Pomni assumed they gained from years of practice. Pomni finally felt secure in all of her limbs remaining intact, yet she now tried to fight off vertigo from being tossed around so much. She fought hurling to muster out an expression of gratitude to Zooble.
“Thanks Zooble. Sorry for shooting you earlier.”
“‘S fine. It didn't hurt, really. Jax–” Zooble eyed her up and down skeptically. Their expression scrunched up a bit, tossing a thought around in her mind, before resigning it to an old coat and sighing. “Nevermind.”
“What a !@#$%^%$#@!@!#%$!#@$!@#$!@#$$%^^%^&%@#$%@#$%%$^*” Gangle snapped. Everyone stared at her wide eyed. Gangle, growing shy under their gazes, tried to reel herself in, “Sorry, I’m still on an adrenaline high from the tommy gun.”
“Don’t be sorry, whatever you said was probably well deserved…. probably.” Zooble hesitantly reassured her.
“Oh yeah, I only called him slurs I can use!” Gangle said cheerfully.
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Motion sickness was the best way Pomni could describe what she was feeling as a hurricane of emotions spun her head around. Much like a sailor tossed around in a storm, the day had left her writhing in a downpour of her own mourn, desperately trying to not let it swallow her whole. There was a silence like a plague that filled the air after the gunpowder had settled and the chatter had faded– it clung to her lungs, weighing them down like lead as she walked alone down the hall. A thousand voices seemed to fill her head, each feeling the need to loudly proclaim their own insufferable opinion when all Pomni needed was silence. One mourned the loss of a friendship, the other berated her for ever thinking she had one with him and giving him that much of herself, while another tried to reason that vulnerability isn’t the problem– it’s Jax– which only gave the voice of guilt and rage within her more gusto as it howled at her. The plaques of abstracted characters that watched her as she trudged past with their painted eyes, partially skewed beneath crimson X’s, only made the voices scream louder. Her stomach churned. She suppressed a shiver. She tried to laser focus on making it to her room, gaze fixing on her doorknob, urging her knobby knees forward for the hope of asylum there.
However, as she reached for her door, hand poised around the handle, Jax rounded the corner and they locked eyes. Pomni stood there utterly petrified, hand twitching around the handle. The purple rabbit’s gaze was an intense whirlpool of complex emotions skewed behind large black irises, but the one that sat above them all was terror. No matter how thickly he painted on his plaster mask, nothing could hide the weariness in his stature– bags beneath his eyes, his scruffy and moussed fur, his labored breathing, his dishevelled clothing– he looked sickly. Pomni felt a crushing pain in her chest, as she came to peer at the damage she did dead in the eyes. The green voice of guilt within her only grew louder, churning her stomach. It was only then Pomni had realized Jax had stopped as well, frozen like a deer in headlights, one arm cradling the other in a feeble attempt to comfort himself. Something akin to mortification and dread flashes across Jax’s face and a broad smile quickly snatched away any trace of him faltering. Pomni saw the cracks in his mask that he failed to seal plain as day. She saw his damage plain as day.
“Do it,” he whispered with a cruel grin that split his face in two. Pomni stared down the barrel of the gun where the tip pressed against his forehead. He leaned into it, as if he was trying to prove he could no longer feel pain. But Pomni did. Pomni felt the pain of tears pressing against the backs of her eyes as if trying to force them out of her skull, she felt the singing pain of her fist curling in so hard on itself she was certain it would have bled, she felt the jabbing pain of her heart trying to break out of her ribcage with its savage pounding. The pain was a reminder that she was alive in some facet. She memorized each detail that made her skin crawl like a prayer, clung onto every time she was at a loss for words as if the act itself were a sonnet, everything that made her stomach churn like it was sacred– and she clung onto this moment now– because, despite the emptiness of the bloated abyssal pools that fixed on her, a flash of fear danced across them, so quickly you’d miss it if you weren’t watching closely. Pomni clung onto every scrap of humanity she had fiercely, sparking her nerves to a flame as she yanked her hand out of his grasp.
Pomni ripped her gaze away from his. Jax, seemingly unaffected, sauntered towards his room, his smile bobbing with his overly animated walk. A cold bitter feeling overtook her, a sudden feeling of unmistakable ease possessed him. His lanky frame sauntered to his room as if he had invisible paper wings upon his back, or invisible strings ushering him forward. Pomni found herself staring at the painted plaque of Jax on his door long after he slammed it shut, imagining a crimson X painted over it, like those before him. She shuttered, finally gaining the gumption to force herself into her room. The sound of it clicking shut rang through the silent hallway.
Their portraits left to grace each other with their gazes, Pomni’s large, round, tear-ridden eyes fixed on Jax’s passive ones– which avoid her stare, instead directing his Cheshire grin to the darkness at the end of the hall. Two doors stand in opposition, so unmoving they might as well be walls.