Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

She woke up again. The tingling feeling of slipping further and further down into her own mind and the thousands of dreams she has all at once start to fall. She lifts her head from the ball she curls herself into in the far corner of the tent. She likes the tent. It is all she has lived in for a while now, with the few attempts from the others in having her try and leave it when it is night all resulting in her running back to the tent. It is safe, and she needs to be safe.

Almost every day she can remember has had someone try and join her. It is usually the red and blue jester–god does she wish to remember their names–who comes in to tell her about the things that have happened that day, or to vent about an argument between two people whose names always manage to slip once she has left. Other days, the jester will come in and just sit there, crying. She doesn’t speak, it is as if she is incapable of it. Those are nice days.

Other days it will be a ragdoll with a blue dress. All she does is cry about trying to be better. For a reason unknown, she can tell the doll is in the wrong. She does not want the doll around, she is sickened by her. Other days it will be a ceramic mask given a body by ribbons. This one shows pictures, sometimes of her, but usually of things she cannot comprehend. It is a nice diversion to see, but the fractalized way she now takes in the world makes it hard to see any of the details the girl puts into her art. There are two others, some sort of abstract toy and a chess piece, neither seeming like it is of their own volition to enter her tent. They both sit in front of her, asking questions to each other, sometimes attempting to put a hand on her; she only accepts touch from the jester, she recoils in pain.

There are days where she just sits in silence, listening to the buzz of her own body, the way she growls and bellows, quiet and strong. The days where it is just her seem to seep together, acting as buffers between when one of the characters try to enter. She does not cherish these days as they do not have the jester. The jester cares, even when she is not trying to comfort her, she is in the tent because she cares.

One day, the jester brought a mirror into the tent and she saw her own face. She hated it. She saw herself over and over, and yet she could not find herself in the thousands of reflections. That was the last time someone brought something to her.

She was no longer in the tent, she never really was.

She spent every day playing piano, or cards, or standing by a light post, or standing outside the doll's empty room, or beside a cliff, or in a room under stars, that room, that room. The room was now empty, yet she could still hear a voice, a voice asking questions she wished she never answered, questions that led her here, questions that were her fault.

She felt all of these places, all of their emotions, everything all at once. She felt herself yell, and felt as the person she was yelling at. She would stand while walking while sitting while running while crying. She would cry a lot.

She could not do much in her new body, and so most days were spent thinking of the last time someone came to her. Every day that there was no one she would think she had been forgotten, it was easy to believe. She didn’t interact with them, she couldn’t when she tried, so at some point she just gave up. She had been turned into nothing, a nothing that took up space, a nothing that could not be forgotten. Sometimes she wishes she would just be forgotten.

 

She is greeted with a familiar face, the jester again. She was holding something too dark to see.

”It’s a blanket. You can’t glitch it, so I can get close to you without damage now,” she spoke quietly, as if to calm a small child.

All sounds coming in were glitching and distorted, but she had become used to it to where she can understand what people are saying.

The girl walked up, draping the blanket around her. It was dark to the point of taking in the light around it, making the jester seem as to disappear if not for her face.

”I’m just going to sleep here, ok?”

She wanted to tell the jester no, to not be with her, that she hurt the girl last time they tried to get close. She was unable to. She could speak, but not in the place where the jester and the others lived, only in her own mind, where she was alone.

There was the one time where the girl managed to find her way into her mind, started talking to her, tried to save her. It had not worked, she knew it wouldn’t, yet she always thinks of what would happen if she stayed for a little longer, hugged a little tighter. The answer was probably that the jester would just join her in this state of half death, but she never could truly know.

The jester was next to her now, curled up in a similar way to how she was. The smaller woman had taken a few of the stray pillows that lined the floor and made a makeshift bed for herself. The jester had draped the blanket over her, completely disappearing into darkness, yet her presence was still there, still warm and comforting.

”Goodnight.”

She looked at where the woman was, and although she could not see the jester, she knew she was there. Not just there in the sense of physically there, but more as in there for her, there to comfort her, there to make sure nothing happened to her.

She curled herself around the small island of pillows the smaller woman made and began to close her eyes.

Chapter Text

Pomni was starting to wake up. She cherished the nights she was able to sleep near Jax, the nights where he was more calm. She had worked for the past few weeks with Kinger and Caine on a material that could not get glitched out by the abstraction, and they finally managed to make one. The plan was to replace the textures of everyone’s body with it, but that didn’t work for some weird reason. All of the coding things the two talked about went completely over the jester’s head, so she was just glad her input, uninformed as it may be, was considered.

Lifting herself up, Pomni looked around for the abstraction she knew was Jax. He wasn’t there. She started to panic. There were ways to rationalize it: he had left the tent despite never having done it before, he was hiding somewhere even though he had never hid from her, maybe Kinger needed to bring him somewhere and for some reason decided not to inform her. Luckily, in some form, the panic that was beginning to gnaw at her chest was replaced with confusion, as looking where Jax was only the night before revealed not an abstraction, not even Jax, but Ribbit.

“Hello?...”

She started to reach out, grazing her finger against its cheek. It was taking in deep breaths, its chest lifting up and down like cresting waves. She wanted to wake it up, check if it was Jax, but it didn’t make sense. The only thing that made sense was that she was dreaming. Pinching herself didn’t work, nor did using sharp teeth to bite down on her arm, both just making her wince as she looked down at the person beside them.

They looked exactly like Ribbit, exactly the person they saw when she was in Jax’s mind, but there was no way that was it. On one hand, they really felt like getting a second opinion, on the other, leaving Jax? Ribbit? Whoever alone did not seem like a smart idea. She needed to act rational, and the most rational option seemed to be trying to wake this person up, figuring out who they are, and then getting Kinger. While Caine might have more knowledge, and he is seemingly reformed, the jester still cannot fully trust him after all she went through.

Pomni placed a hand onto the cheek of the frog, feeling as they got slightly warmer, eyes fluttering open. They let out a soft groan, starting to sit up, before suddenly freezing.

“Where am I?”

It was Ribbit’s voice, the same thing they heard in Jax’s head a few months ago. It was jarring to hear it in the real world, well, what was the real world to Pomni. It was also apparently jarring to the frog, whose eyes went wide and straight through the jester upon hearing their own voice.

“Um… the circus?” Pomni wasn’t all too sure what was going on, “In a tent.”

She hoped that the person she was speaking to would at least understand that. This still felt like dreaming, but if this was real, she needed to help whoever they were.

They tried to stand up, falling forward onto Pomni, face landing onto her chest. They looked down in fear at their legs, then fell backwards onto the cold floor, before scrambling backwards. They had started to hyperventilate.

“Please, stay calm. I’m not sure what is happening, but try and calm down.”

Pomni held out a hand, not really knowing what to do. She was never all too good at calming people down. She silently begged for Ragatha to come in here, even though she never would.

“Who am I?” the person asked, terrified yet stern. They needed an answer that Pomni was not able to give.

“Do you know who you are?”

She needed to deflect. Calling Ribbit Jax, or god forbid, calling Jax Ribbit, would have horrible consequences. All she knows about the two’s relationship was what she saw through Jax’s eyes, and the little that she had managed to pry out of Ragatha, all of which painted the picture of two people that should not interact with each other.

The frog gave her a massive grin, one that would look normal on a cartoon bunny, but looks uncanny on a frog whose features were not meant to stretch this much.

“Jax.”

It made more sense than Ribbit somehow coming back, but not by much. Everything that Caine had explained pointed to abstractions being irreversible, yet here was objective proof of the opposite, at least in some respect.

“Do I not look like Jax?”

They both knew the answer was no, he probably even knew who he looked like, yet neither wanted to admit it. Pomni had to find a better way.

“Would you like to go see yourself?”

It was probably not the best answer, but the jester had just woken up, and was not prepared mentally nor emotionally to face Jax again, even in someone else’s body.

“Gladly.”

Hearing what has only been a kind and supportive voice in her ears now be so vitriolic and pained was uncomfortable. Pomni knew how Ribbit was supposed to speak and it wasn’t this, this was Jax… somehow.

He took her hand, and with a tug, was on his feet. He was clearly not used to being so much shorter, constantly looking at his feet. It was also apparent that his mannerisms weren't changed. The frog was trying to widen his pupils to blot out his sclera, but without a rubberhose body, all it managed to do was show a clear strain in his face.

He looked directly into Pomni’s eyes. He knew.

“J-just follow me.”

“Doesn't seem to me like I have any other options.”

“I can bring a mirror here?”

“Nah, I’ll follow you.”

“Good to have you back, Jax,” Pomni chuckled, stopping the frog dead in his tracks.

He looked past Pomni, into the blankets that were used as a door in and out of his tent.

“Yeah… yeah, good.”

It was spoken just loud enough to hear, while clearly not being directed towards the jester.

“You ok?”

“Wonderful,” he lied, trying and failing once again to do his signature grins, clearly getting frustrated at his inability.

The two walked out of the pillow fort, shielding their eyes as they exited and were bathed in artificial light. Jax was clearly finding it difficult to walk, but completely denied it once he was asked by Pomni. She noticed him stare at all the new things that were added to the circus: the line of portals each decorated for their respective adventure, halls to new places like the library, aquarium, and garden, a bar placed nearby the entrance, and no massive plastic tunnels. Eventually, they got to the mirror Pomni, and apparently Jax, had first seen themself in.

Once placed in front of the mirror, he froze. Then there was heavy breathing and the scribbling eyes that Pomni recognized from her own panic attacks here. By the time the jester had managed to pry him away from his own reflection, two streams of tears had joined.

“Why do I look like that?!” he bit out in a yell, grabbing down on the girl’s shoulders with as much strength as his body would allow.

“I… I don’t know.”

It was an honest answer, but maybe not the best one to help her friend.

“Why her?” he managed to squeak out, before grabbing the jester and pulling her in tight.

The two continued to hug, Jax crying, Pomni trying to reassure him without knowing any more than he does about what happened to him. This was all way too much for both of them. She assured him that things would be ok, and that it could be fixed, and that she truly didn’t know why this was happening. While she didn’t believe the first two, she needed him to believe them.

The thought of Jax to come back only to abstract immediately fell into the jester’s mind. She would need to keep an eye on him. She needed to keep an eye on him before. She let him abstract.

It was a terrible thought to have, yet Pomni could not avoid it. Almost every night since it happened, she would find a way to blame herself, find a time where she wasn’t good enough, find a place where if she said something different things would be ok. Were they ok now? He was back, that was what she wanted. It was good that he was back, she should be happy, they both should be. Why was she not happy?

“Let's go get Kinger,” she stated, trying to find something to distract.

Kinger would know what to do if anyone would. Even when something would happen that seemed to have no logical explanation, he would know something that made it make sense to the jester. She tried to move him closer to the character hall, yet he wouldn’t move.

“Um…” he looked around for another solution, “Could you bring him here?”

“No. I don’t trust you by yourself anymore, so you are coming with me.”

He visibly tensed once she said it. It came off more mean than Pomni was intending, but she did believe everything that she was saying. The last time she let him be by himself without supervision, he abstracted, and there was no way she would allow that to happen again.

“Could we like, wait in my tent until Kinger gets here?”

He really seemed to be avoiding someone, and while normally she would press into someone for being so avoidant, Pomni decided to give him at least a little bit of leeway given that he had just come back alive after months of being practically dead.

“You can wait in my room and I’ll get Kinger,” she met him in the middle.

He needed to be in a place where he could not leave without someone knowing, and Pomni supposed that her own room would be the best place.

“Fine.”

The walk to Pomni’s room was technically uneventful, yet still held a massive stress on the two. Neither knew what they would say if someone were to see them, so just paced with a decent amount of speed. Jax was holding onto the jester’s wrist for dear life, his grip strength only growing in intensity the closer the two got to the others. Both sets of eyes were darting around, trying to see any signs of movement, with luckily no result.

By the time the two got to Pomni’s room, both were exhausted and panicked, just slumping past the door. She had nearly completely changed the room ever since Caine gave them much more direct access to how the circus worked, and while directly manipulating most things was a mutually off limits thing, bedrooms is where most of the creativity of the circus members went. Pomni ended up sticking with a very monochromatic room with a few streaks of blue and red to match her circus given aesthetic. She left her bed nearly the same, just dulling down the colors, but besides that, every piece of furniture was changed to something more human in proportions, and all in shades of black, blackish grey, and dark grey.

The two ended up with a seating arrangement of Jax on the bed while Pomni sat in her desk chair, facing him.

“Guessing this wasn’t how your room was before I left?”

Left. The way he decided to phrase it caught the attention of the jester. He made it seem like it was a voluntary action on his part, one that was unimportant, even temporary. Maybe that was how he saw it?

’I don’t want to go’

It rang through her head. He was terrified that night. Maybe he had found a way to conceptualize it?

“Yeah,” she thought of the best way of revealing Caine’s change of heart without making it too obvious, “We were given the ability to do it ourselves.”

Either he didn’t pick up on it, or more likely, didn’t have the mental energy to go into it, as Jax began to question the girl.

“So I’m like… not crazy, I do look and sound like-”

“Ribbit, yeah.”

The two left the silence simmering between them.

Pomni thinks back to her nights with Ragatha; she had finally gotten the ragdoll to start talking about what was bothering her, and while most of it was being stuck here, or her mother, or blaming herself for Jax’s death, Ribbit was also most certainly there. She thinks back to what the doll said, how she ‘would have loved you’ and how much ‘you remind me of her’, and now here she was. It wasn’t Ribbit though, was it, it was Jax, but for reasons neither could figure out–maybe the world’s cruel sense of spite and drama, or maybe something worse–Jax had come back in the body of the person he feared the most. At least, she thinks he fears Ribbit. It could be grief, and the longer she sits here in the room with the frog, the more she thinks it is. Grief for killing her, grief for letting himself die, grief for not trying hard enough.

“What are we supposed to do,” he asked, wiping away his tears.

“Um, we get Kinger, try and swap your avatar back, and then reintroduce you to everyone else.”

It was Pomni’s only plan, and it was not a great one, but they had to do something and this was that something.

“What if we can’t switch it back?”

It was the main question that was in Pomni’s mind. Caine had told them that large, permanent changes to their avatars wouldn’t work, so she didn’t have much confidence, but maybe he just didn’t try and assumed it didn’t work, or maybe the fact they would just swapping was easier than changing, or maybe Caine just didn’t know what he was talking about. There were enough reasons for there to be a way of fixing Jax that they had to try.

“Then we’ll find a way to make this work,” Pomni said in as warm of a voice as she could, trying to comfort the frog.

“Is there anything you want to know about before I get Kinger?”

“Is there anyone new in the circus?”

It was once again tense between them. In some way he must have figured it out that Caine returned, and just didn’t want to ask it outright.

“I mean… Caine is back?”

“Why?” Jax pouted, voice starting to rise again.

“Because he’s different now. He gave up most of his powers, and is acting just like us, like a human I mean.”

 

“You don’t think he would just lie about that to screw us over?!”

“Jax. Please, stop yelling, I know this isn’t ideal, but it… it might be better that he’s here.”

“Do you hear yourself!? Do you actually believe he’s changed!?”

“No, not really, but he gave us the same level powers over the circus, so if he tries anything, we can just remove him.”

Was it a cruel arrangement? Most likely, but it was the one that everyone could agree on. They all just made the mutual promise to not change someone without their permission first, and so far it has been a pretty good system.

“He’s…” she wanted to bring up the mind files, and how they were technically also AIs, but that was conversation for later, “Still human, just in a different way.”

“No. He’s not,” Jax let out a sigh.

“Fine, but he’s staying here.”

The two stood quiet. Pomni was slightly glad that most of his fear and panic had turned to rage, although this was still not a great situation for the frog to be in. It was still weird to hear Ribbit’s voice and have what was clearly Jax on the other end, but she would have to get used to it. The chance of Jax getting his body back was slim, and she wasn’t counting on it.

“Gummygoo is also back, he’s the only other person that decided to stay in the circus.”

It didn’t take much convincing to have him come back once Caine brought back the Candy Canyon Kingdom with all its memories back. It took a bit of time to find Gummygoo and his two buddies, especially with having to deal with The Fudge now in the walls, but it didn’t take much time to actually convince him to come back to the circus. His friends were still unaware of the circus and the whole not really being real thing, but they didn’t seem to pry once Gummygoo promised to visit them twice a week. He was such a nice addition to the circus, and Pomni spent most of her time now with either him, Ragatha, or them both.

“He’s not a person. Don’t call him that.”

Jax seemed genuinely furious at the idea that he should treat the AIs, who he is also, as human. The irony makes Pomni crack a smile.

“If you say so.”

Pomni sat there for a good while, waiting for Jax to ask another question. She knew he wanted to ask so many things, it was obvious in the way he taped his leg and refused to make eye contact, but she wasn’t going to force it.

“I’m gonna go get Kinger now, just stay here.”

“Mhm.”

Slowly slipping out the door and closing it behind herself, Pomni started to walk to Kinger’s room. Ever since he has been able to change his room, he has mainly stayed in there, the garden, or just tacks along to adventures. While Caine was not able to fully make him sane, he is still much more there even with a decent amount of light. He still prefers the dark, and so his room is engulfed by it, being a very cozy little nook with books and computers everywhere, the only lights being a low dim of the computer he is using, or a little flashlight he uses to read.

She knocks on the door, not needing to wait long before the man opens it for her.

“Pomni!”

“Hello Kinger. May I come in.”

“Of course!”

He has always been sort of the dad to everyone in the circus, but now more than ever does Pomni need someone who will be a voice of reason. She finds herself on a small velvet couch with purple polka dots, Kinger sitting in front of her by a small wooden desk.

“What seems to be the problem?”

It takes a good moment for Pomni to come up with an explanation that is satisfactory to her, her face scrunching up in thought.

“Take your time,” Kinger told her, trying to give her space to think.

“Jax woke up from abstraction and now looks like Ribbit.”

“Oh,” Kinger was clearly preparing himself mentally for something else, “Are you sure he… she is Ribbit?”

“Yes, and he’s still a guy. I took him to the mirror by the stage and he recognized it as Ribbit.”

There was no real way of explaining how she knew what Ribbit looked like, she had accepted that what happened that night would stay with her until she died.

“Hmm…”

Kinger began to look around, deep in thought, searching for an explanation, making Pomni worry more and more as it seemed like he couldn’t find an answer.

Pomni spoke up, “Maybe you should come to my room with me. He’s in there.”

She was so stressed that he had run away in the small amount of time she had been out of the room.

“Sounds like a plan,” Kinger concurred, giving her a smile.