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Jax doesn’t have to lift his head to know who’s standing in the doorway. Anybody else would have turned around and left him there to suffer without a second thought, either unbothered by his problems or unwilling to acknowledge their existence at all. He wishes Pomni would leave him too, but as the cherry on top of his already incredibly shitty day she seems to have developed a repulsive inclination to actually give a fuck about him.
The sound of running tap water fills the empty moments that Pomni seems to take to contemplate her first words. He hates the way he can feel her eyes on him. She’s observing him, taking in the way his arms tremble as he braces himself against the sink, the way his breaths come in shallow gasps just a bit too frequent for somebody who doesn’t technically need to breathe at all.
“Are you okay?” she settles on.
“I’m fine. Go away.” Jax numbly reaches out and turns off the faucet. He regrets it the instant the silence allows him to make out the faint shuffles of Pomni stepping inside, the door producing a soft thud as it closes behind her.
“No, you’re not okay.” There’s a careful pause before she gingerly asks, “Is there anything I can do?”
“I said I’m fine.”
The silence is back, and to his dismay, the sound of Pomni leaving the bathroom doesn’t break it.
“I’m…sorry I beat you up,” she offers.
“God!” Jax slams his palms down on the countertop, finally snapping his head around to face her. “Why do you care? Why are you still trying? I already told you to stop looking!”
“I care about you because you’re a person, Jax. Whether you believe you are or not.”
Jax turns back to the sink and takes a deep breath in an effort to collect himself. “Go away, Pomni.”
He’d have gladly drop-kicked her halfway down the hall by now if he’d still had rage on his side. But he doesn’t, and anxiety turned to panic turned to exhaustion doesn’t give him the mental or physical energy he needs in order to get rid of her.
Pomni lets out a tense sigh. “Alright. I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want,” she starts, “but first I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen. I can’t force you to take anything I say to heart, but I’m not leaving until I know you’ve heard it. Then, if you still want me to walk away and never reach out to you again, I’ll respect that.”
Jax watches himself raise an eyebrow in the mirror. “Really? You’ll never try this whole ‘bonding’ thing with me again if I just entertain your little lecture?” He lets out a flat chuckle. “Promise?”
“Yep,” Pomni states, so much finality in her voice that he’s actually tempted to believe her. “I’ll leave you alone for the rest of our eternity here, and I’ll just go back to being your punching bag right along with the others. I won’t bring this up ever again unless you come to me first.”
She was extending an evergreen offer of a helping hand, along with the choice to ignore it indefinitely if he wants to. It’s a bit ironic—he’s used to pushing other people’s boundaries for fun, but in a bizarre twist of fate he’s being presented with an opportunity to set his own. Some part of the proposition feels like a trap, but he isn’t sure why.
“Sounds like a good deal to me.” Jax pushes himself away from the sink and turns, trying his best to put on a display of indifference as he sits back against the countertop. He’s half facing Pomni and half focusing on the texture of the stall doors in front of him because he really doesn’t want to focus on Pomni. “Well?” he spares her a sideways glance. “Go on. Enlighten me.”
“You’re not ‘the funny one’.”
“You already told me that, genius.”
“Shut up,” she says through gritted teeth, “and listen.”
For reasons he can’t quite explain, Jax finds himself holding his tongue.
“You’re not the funny one,” Pomni repeats, “and I’m not the one who hasn’t figured it out yet. There’s nothing to figure out, because we’re not f[%$!#]ing archetypes. We’re people. We’re complicated, real people who are just as human in here as we were back home. And I know you know it too.”
She pauses, and Jax thinks that maybe she’s giving him a chance to interject, but by the time he realizes it she’s already talking again.
“You’ve seen Gangle happy when she’s with Zooble, and you’ve seen Zooble calm and friendly when they’re with Gangle. You’ve seen Ragatha open up about her rough home life, and I know you’ve noticed the way she constantly struggles with something underneath the happy face she puts on. I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen Kinger sane, but I have. He’s a wonderful, real person, and not just some silly one-dimensional cartoon character. There’s a hell of a lot more to all of them than you like to think, and there’s a hell of a lot more to you too.”
The bathroom feels suffocating all of the sudden. He hates how her words, ones he hadn’t intended on really listening to in the first place, have managed to shake something loose from the depths of his mind that he’d much prefer to keep sealed away. She’s trapped him here in this room, forcing him to stare at the worldview he’s spent years carefully sculpting, shining a floodlight on it to highlight its imperfections.
“You can believe whatever you want, doesn’t make it true,” Jax responds icily. “I meant it when I said there’s nothing more to me.”
“I think there is. In fact, I know there is. I’m looking at it right now.” Pomni crosses her arms and he feels like a kid again, caught trying to change the grades on his report card. “If you were ‘the funny one’, you wouldn’t have led me on just to stab me in the back later like you said you did. If you were ‘the one who causes pain for fun’, you wouldn’t be here like this,” she gestures to his slumped figure, “having a crisis over the fact that you hurt somebody. You’re more than an archetype, Jax. You’re human. But you’re the only one here who’s trying to pretend they’re not.”
He hates how she’s just standing there, effortlessly casting a hook and line down into the recesses of his psyche, reeling up the things he’s hidden from himself, examining them, deciphering them, seeing him, making him feel. And he hates that he’s letting her.
Feeling was for Ragatha. Feeling was for Gangle. Feeling was for people who cared enough to feel.
He wasn’t supposed to feel.
Deep down beneath the pain and the anger and everything else she’s dredged to the surface against his will, Jax knows that there’s some truth to Pomni’s words. But even as it stares him in the face, he knows he’ll never be able to accept it. He’s spent so long in the comfortable reality he’s built for himself that it’s all he consists of. If he tries to challenge it, if he thrusts a crowbar into one of the many cracks that Pomni has identified in his logic, it’ll only break him apart too.
But Pomni doesn’t know that. She thinks there’s still hope for him. She thinks that all he needs to do is simply come to his senses and see that he’s human, acknowledge that he does care about the others, and live happily ever after.
But Pomni hasn’t been around for as long as he has. She hasn’t seen the things he’s seen, so she doesn’t understand why he has to be the way he is. She doesn’t understand what caring about other people does to you in the circus.
It gets you hurt.
It gets you abstracted.
It gets you hurt when your friends abstract.
It gets your friends hurt when you abstract.
But Pomni hasn’t experienced any of that yet. She’s naïve. Painfully, blissfully, naïve.
“I’m really f[%$!#]ing pissed at you for what you did to me today.” Pomni’s arms uncross and fall to her sides. “But I also know you said the things you said because you have a hard time admitting to yourself that you do actually care about the rest of us. Because for some reason, that scares you. I get it—we all have our fears. But if you keep being an [%$!#]hole and pushing everyone away, there won’t be anyone there for you when you fall. You’re hurting, and we both know you can’t keep this up forever.”
“Wanna bet?” Jax snaps, but the words are empty, and they lose momentum before their intended impact ever reaches Pomni. In fact, he’s quite certain by this point that nothing he says can phase her.
She seems to already have every comeback, every counterargument, every part of him documented and analyzed as if she’s toured the deepest darkest corners of his mind, intimately familiar with the painful truths he’s gotten so good at stuffing down there. She’ll catch anything he throws at her, shake it free from the lies he tells himself, and toss it right back at him. She’s done what nobody else has ever cared enough to do and figured him out.
And he hates it.
“For the record, I’d remember you.” She says it quietly, almost lovingly as if softening her tone would make the scenario less likely to come to fruition. “And I’d go to your funeral. I might be the only one, but I’d go. Because you’re a person, and no matter how sh[%$!#]y you might have been to me, you still deserve basic respect.”
Her words feel like a punch to the stomach, and he doesn’t have to glance at the mirror behind him to know that it shows on his face. There’s a part of Jax that wants to scream bloody murder at her for what she’s done to him. He wants to tear her walls down and rip her soul out and make her feel everything she’s never wanted to feel.
But beneath the fury there’s also a smaller, selfish and illogical yet very real part of him that wants to grab onto Pomni like a lifeline even though she could probably never save him from himself. Even as the temptation wells up inside of him, he knows he won’t do it.
Because for some stupid fucking reason he’s repeated the two mistakes he’d sworn to never make again—he’s allowed himself to care about somebody, and he’s allowed that somebody to believe he’s worth caring about in return.
And because he cares about Pomni, he refuses to hurt her when the years of anguish he’s gotten so good at internalizing inevitably send him to the cellar one day. And as long as he can help it, he sure as hell isn’t going to drag her down there with him.
So he does the only thing he can, says the only thing that she can’t turn around and use as an argument against him because she promised him she wouldn’t.
“Leave,” he quietly begs. “And give up on me.”
“Okay.” Pomni turns and exits the bathroom. The door thuds shut behind her.
He’d put the final nail in his coffin, knowing damn well he would never use the rear end of the hammer to pry it back out.