Chapter Text
The first time Jax sleeps over in Pomni’s room, she finds herself oddly nervous.
Technically, it isn’t actually the first time—that honour belongs to the incident after she’d apologised for blowing up on Pomni during that woodland adventure—but falling asleep once the initial excitement died down had been an accident, and she’d quickly fled the scene upon waking. She hasn’t slept in someone else’s room in years, and despite the warm, curling sun that lingered in her chest in the aftermath, a part of her kind of wants to forget it ever happened. They hadn’t even slept underneath the blankets. It hadn’t been on purpose; she’d not been invited, it doesn’t count.
She desperately wants to do it again.
Asking for it, however, is an entirely different ball game.
It’s some random mid-afternoon, the day Jax finally plucks up the courage. Caine had decided on some kind of bizarre dance-slash-puzzle-game combo for their latest adventure, and there’s neon lights and bass thudding so hard through whatever pocket-dimension they’re in that it’s like they’re in someone’s veins. They’re all being forced to jump between pulsating, unstable platforms as music beats rush at them like semi-trucks. It’s so loud—but, if she’s being honest, she’s actually having a lot of fun. It’s like they’ve been eaten alive by Dance Dance Revolution.
It’s another costume-changing adventure, too, so they’re currently looking like a pack of glowsticks threw up on them. Jax has never worn highlighter-blue fishnets or a bright pink miniskirt before, but—well, there’s a first time for everything.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Pomni moans, pinwheel eyes spinning dizzily as she hits a series of different moves in rapid succession, ‘NICE’ flashing above her head in bubble-font gold.
“Not much of a dancer?” Jax teases, although she has to yell to be heard over the din.
Pomni shoots her a scathing glare. “You know I’m not!”
Jax kicks her leg up to hit a pose, and all of a sudden the jester’s stare rockets in the other direction. Ragatha’s stumbling on in front of them (on her third attempt at not careening off the platform that keeps tilting wildly beneath her), and Zooble’s doing about how she expected, but Gangle is managing shockingly well; having a body that can stretch into different shapes so easily must be coming in handy.
Somewhere a few platforms away, Kinger hits an absolutely stunning combo.
The level they’re on ends with a fade-out, the platforms dulling until the only lights are the ones flashing in the skyless void around them as the results music starts to play. Kinger is first, which is both surprising and honestly fairly predictable at this point. Gangle is second, Jax is written in third, Pomni is fourth, and Ragatha and Zooble are joint fifth. Their combined score is actually pretty good; enough for them to have passed the round, at least.
It’s not long after that that the adventure ends. For a moment after they’ve gone through the portal, the outfits they’d been put in remain, highlighter neons stark against the more childish shades of the circus. Jax gets about five seconds to look at Pomni in the full-light—dressed in a yellow and teal windbreaker that looks straight out of the eighties and still reeling with motion sickness—before everyone’s reset back to their default clothes.
Jax had been at the back of the group; no one else saw her in the skirt except for Pomni, who’d been looking over at her for nearly the whole adventure. That sure makes her feel something, but she has no idea what.
“Whoops, sorry for the delay there!” Caine says, tipping upside down to put himself in the centre of the group. “Just a glitch in your model reset! Did you enjoy the adventure?”
“Yes,” Jax says immediately, before anyone can complain. The rest of the group turns to look at her, and she shrugs. “What? Rhythm games are cool. There were lasers.”
Zooble hums, considering. “I guess it did kind of remind me of a concert I went to one time.”
“And that’s a good thing?” Caine asks beseechingly.
Zooble looks at the AI a bit funny. “Yeah…?”
Caine pumps his fist and takes out his notebook to do what is probably supposed to look like note-taking, but from what Jax can see looks more like a drawing of a cartoon bee with a huge smile and big, sparkly eyes.
From there, Gangle and Kinger make some positive comments as well. Pomni says she thought the jacket was okay, and Ragatha just says that she’s glad everyone else had fun. One by one, everyone begins to wander off—Ragatha, Zooble, and Gangle head towards the room hallway, Kinger makes a predictable beeline towards his fort, and Pomni starts in the direction of the kitchen.
Jax follows Pomni, which is probably also becoming predictable at this point.
Pomni glances back with an amused smile when she catches the sound of footsteps from behind her. “So… rhythm games? And here I thought you preferred the first-person shooters.”
“Hey, I can like both!” Jax defends, though the tone is light, casual. “Shooter games have guns and violence, and rhythm games have ear-poundingly loud music and eye-searing colours. They’re both little adrenaline microdoses in their own way.”
Pomni tilts her head contemplatively as they reach the entrance to the kitchen. Immediately, she heads for the fridge. “I guess that makes sense. I should’ve figured you’d like the more high-energy stuff.”
“What can I say? I’m an adrenaline junkie.” She is now, at least—being in a digital circus where pain has no long-term consequences is the perfect place to indulge in the kind of reckless behaviour that you can’t get away with in real life. In any other setting, after all, you can only go skydiving without a parachute once.
Pomni makes an agreeable noise as she sticks her head in the fridge, rooting around for something to eat. After a few seconds, she pulls out a box of crackers. Even after all this time, Caine still doesn’t always remember which foods go where; some things never change). “So, you wanna hang out for the rest of the day?” Pomni offers, light as any other conversation.
The answer to that is, of course, yes. The answer to that is also you make my days better than they’ve been in a long, long time and I want to sleep in your room tonight.
“Um, well—” Jax freezes instead, because she apparently can’t pry the foot out of her mouth to save her life.
Pomni pauses mid-cracker-chew, clearly misinterpreting. “We don’t have to if you have other plans, it’s no worries—”
“No!” she blurts, and even without any semblance of digital blood, she can feel the way her face flushes with embarrassment. “I mean—I was just thinking that—I thought… $h!%,” she groans limply. “Have you ever had, like, a girls’ night before?”
Pomni blinks. “As in here, or just in general?” she asks slowly.
“Whichever. Either.”
“Uh, generally speaking? I guess I had a couple sleepovers with other girls as a kid, if those count. Nothing really after that,” Pomni muses, deep in thought. “...Here? It was less of a girls’ night and more just that we were awake at the same time and didn’t want to be on our own. But, yeah—me, Ragatha, and Gangle stayed up together in Ragatha’s room once, sometime after that Spudsy’s adventure. Why?”
Jax falters, embarrassingly nervous about something that probably isn’t even a big deal—but is also apparently the biggest deal in this whole stupid circus. What is she supposed to do? Ask for what she wants?
…Crap. She totally has to ask.
Still, she snatches a cracker from Pomni’s box and chews until she has no choice but to answer. “Well, I was thinking—”
“Did it hurt?”
Jax chokes on a laugh, batting vaguely in the direction of the jester’s arm. Way to cut the tension, Pommers. “Shut up! I’m trying to be serious and you’re ruining it!”
“My bad, my bad. What were you thinking?” Pomni rounds back, smirk lingering on her face but less outwardly teasing.
“I was thinking,” she reiterates, Pomni rolling her eyes even as she leans forward in interest. “About—you know, girls’ nights.”
The clown stares at her imploringly. “What about them?”
“Uh, maybe, like… having one.”
Pomni eyes widen in surprise, and Jax knows what she’s thinking before she’s so much as said a word. “You mean you—”
“No, this isn’t me wanting to tell the others anything!” she hurries to correct, and then hurries some more when Pomni’s expression becomes a little more scrutinising. “Yet. That’s—that’ll be someday, I promise. I just… I just kinda wanted to have one with you. You know, just us.”
Any remaining narrow edges to her curiosity fold in on themselves like fresh laundry. “I’d love to,” Pomni tells her, voice warm. Then, “Your room, or mine?”
“Yours.” Jax replies immediately. Pomni raises an eyebrow but, mercifully, doesn’t question it.
“Okay then, my room it is,” she agrees, before pointing a finger at Jax. “But that means you’re bringing the snacks.”
“Sure, I can live with that.” Jax shrugs, trying not to look too excited. There’s a pause afterwards, where she’s not sure how to move the conversation on from there, but Pomni’s face takes on a contemplative sheen, and Jax lends the silence to whatever idea she’s apparently having.
After a moment of thought, she smiles conspiratorially. “I’m gonna go get some stuff ready—maybe come in in, like, an hour? Or anytime after that.”
She wants to ask what the stuff is, but if Pomni wants it to be a surprise, then… well, that’s kind of fun. They exchange a temporary goodbye that she won’t remember a word of, and Jax walks off before realising that she has no idea what to do with herself for the next hour.
Jax paces around the circus for a full ten minutes before realising that, if someone sees her, they’re going to ask why she’s circling around like a caged animal. She goes to her own room after that, but the whole time is spent sitting up in bed and tapping her foot against the mattress, thinking way too hard.
It’s not that she’s never slept in someone else’s room before. On the contrary, for most of her time in the circus (before the before, at least), she’d vastly preferred it to sleeping in her own.
The look of her room alone had made Jax nervous from the moment she'd first stepped foot in it. It was everything that she hadn’t wanted a name for at the time; pink and soft and never, never meant for her. Ribbit had been in it, once or twice—when the days had been better, and her curiosity had been too insatiable—but when the day cycle fell stumbling into night, it was Ribbit’s room they vacated to, her and sometimes Kaufmo as well. Fortunately, Ribbit had never been cruel enough to pry too deeply into why she preferred their room over her own.
The only thing she’d ever asked was why Jax never wanted to share the bed. Their floor was more comfortable than Jax’s mattress had ever been, though, and… it would have been weird to share. Too intimate. Too much.
(It wasn’t the only thing Ribbit had ever asked her, really—but, out of the two biggest questions, that was the one that hurt the least.)
(There are three chairs in her room, right in the corner opposite the bed, that haunt her like apparitions in the night; one pink, one yellow, one green. No one else had ever sat in them. She’d never given them the chance.)
…Pomni asked her to bring snacks. It’s been a while enough now—she can go to the kitchen and get them before she goes over.
Thankfully, she manages to make it to the kitchen without running into anyone else, otherwise she’s sure they’d question the stilted stop-starts of her movements. Regardless, she searches through the cabinets and takes her best guesses at what they both want. She comes to the final conclusion of a box of crackers, two bags of crisps, and a suspiciously un-branded bag of gummy sweets before making her exit.
But now Jax is in front of Pomni’s door for their first real, deliberate sleepover, and she finds herself oddly nervous. She’s got one arm full of snacks, and another free for knocking, but as she raises her hand against the door, she realises that she’s not sure what’s going to happen when she goes inside. It’s supposed to be a girls’ night. It’s new territory—even if it wasn’t, she hasn’t stayed over in someone else’s room in a long time. What if she does it wrong? Is there a way to do it wrong? What if she runs out of things to say?
For God’s sake, no. She’s not going to stand Pomni up on their girls’ night just because she has no idea what she’s doing. She literally asked for this—she is not running away this time.
Using the slowly escalating ache in her arms from holding on to the tower of food as motivation, Jax bites the bullet, and knocks on the door.
Pomni answers just moments later, obvious in who she’s been expecting from the way her gaze automatically tilts upwards. When their eyes meet, a pleased smile slides onto her face. There’s nothing different about Pomni that might reveal whatever she’d wanted the preparation time for, but—then again, Jax can’t exactly see into her room fully from the doorway.
“You ready?” the jester asks, in lieu of a proper greeting.
“Aren’t I always?” Jax replies, with a slightly harried sort of brightness that Pomni immediately gives her a very long look for. “I, uh, didn’t know how much stuff to bring.”
She does a quick scan of the pile in Jax’s arms, and nods approvingly. “That looks good—we can always grab more if we want anyway. You wanna come in now?” she offers, stepping back to open the door more widely.
“I actually just wanted to dump this all on your head and make a break for it,” Jax replies, despite the fact that she’s literally walking through the door as she says it.
Pomni’s room is about the same as it was the last time Jax was in it, although admittedly she hadn’t been paying too much attention to her surroundings at the time. Almost everything is painted in the same shades of red-yellow-blue as the clown herself, with the exception of her bed frame, a vanity, and a weirdly realistically rendered set of wooden drawers. There are a bunch of what look like children’s boardgames organised in a pile on one side of the room, and a stack of alphabet blocks in front of the drawers—presumably so she can reach the upper compartments.
It’s… the colour scheme probably isn’t very her, personality-wise, but she’s clearly organised it to her liking since she came here. Jax wonders what she thought of it when she first saw it.
That doesn't matter right now, though. Currently, she needs to do something about the snack-related ache in her arms. “Where should I dump these?” she asks, nodding towards the food tower she’s balancing.
“Just put them on the bed for now,” Pomni dismisses, waving towards the four-poster. “I was thinking we could have some of it a little later.”
Jax tosses them over, knowing that nothing in the boxes will break into crumbs until the packaging is opened. It’s a Schrödinger’s cat sort of food-fragility. Schrödinger’s crisps. “Oh? What are we doing right now, then?” she enquires, in lieu of voicing any of that.
“I had an idea,” Pomni starts, which is either a really good opening or a really worrying one. She sits down on the vanity’s matching stool, and Jax takes a seat on an oddly wide yet incredibly low armchair in the corner nearest the vanity when Pomni gestures for her to as well. “I was trying to think, like, what’s a thing people do on girls’ nights, right? And, well…”
“Yeah…?” Jax goads, not quite worried but on the border of some kind of trepidation. Pomni nods towards the vanity table, and Jax suddenly notices that there’s stuff on it; tubes and tubs and cases in a variety of different colours.
It takes her a slightly absurd amount of time to realise what it is before Pomni says it aloud. “Have you ever tried makeup out?”
Jax blinks at the set, genuinely baffled. “Where did you get that?” she asks, because that really is the more pressing question. There’s no way it came with the room—Caine has never given them anything to customise their avatars with inside the circus proper before, especially not apropos of nothing.
“I swiped it from the dress-up room in that swap adventure while you were getting changed,” she confesses, almost sheepish. “At first I was just thinking that it might be nice to have at least some kind of control over the way I look here, but then after everything happened, I wondered if you’d want to try it out with me. I didn’t get the time to ask straight after the adventure because—again, the everything—but I thought this seemed like a good opportunity to bring it up.”
Jax's face crawls into a grin. “You clever little thief,” she laughs, and it’s damn near startling how relieved she feels. She’d been ridiculously nervous about tonight—how could she have forgotten the woman she’s with? “I can’t believe I didn’t hear you stuffing your pockets in there.”
“I’m honestly just shocked it didn’t disappear when our outfits changed back,” Pomni shrugs, before looking at her more curiously. “So, what do you think? Do you wanna try it?”
To answer the question that had been left behind before—Jax has never tried makeup, in neither the circus nor the real world. In the same way that the idea of a dress had haunted the back of her head in what she previously excused as a vague, bucket-list type curiosity, however, she’s definitely thought about it.
(They’d had some in the family home, back when she was still there; in the bathroom, behind the mirror cabinet, next to the spare toothpaste. A lipstick tube, a tub, and two palettes of unknowable somethings—but it was never so much as touched by her hands if not to move it out of the way for something else. She doesn’t know why she remembers it so clearly.)
(Or, well, maybe she does.)
(She wonders, just for a second, what her family would even think of her now. It doesn't matter now, though. It's not mattered for a long time.)
“You did go to all that effort to steal it. How could I possibly refuse?” Jax teases, smirking past the way old nerves still insist on rising in tandem with the excitement at the back of her throat. Pomni rolls her eyes as she organises all the little bottles and boxes.
She starts pointing the sets out once they’ve all seemingly been sorted into categories, beginning to explain. “I’ve never been, like, the biggest makeup person in the world, so you’re gonna have to bear with me here,” she prefaces. “But, if I’m right, the stuff on the left is blush and maybe concealer, the stuff next to it is all eye makeup like liner and eyeshadow, the sticks next to that are lipstick and gloss, and the bottles on the right are all nail varnish. There are a couple of makeup brushes in the drawer, I just didn’t want them to roll off the table.”
Jax takes a second to let that all process in her head. “Do you have to put them on in some kind of order?” she asks, and judging by the considering look she gets in return, it’s probably a valid question.
“People usually go with things like foundation first so everything else sits on top, and then blush and stuff that covers smaller sections of the face. I don’t think Caine’s heard of foundation, though, and it probably doesn’t matter as much here. Do you have anything in particular that you want to start with?”
“Let’s just go with the blush first,” she decides, if only for the sake of keeping things simple. After hovering a hand over the selection of different coloured cases for a moment that feels like it lasts about a year, she resorts to simply squeezing her eyes shut and picking one at random, opening them again to find that it’s a soft sort of middle-shade between pink and red.
True to mention, Pomni opens the vanity drawer and produces a puffy little brush from inside. Trying not to look too nervous about it, Jax hands her the case, and she cracks it open and turns the brush about to cover it in the powder. Jax expects that actual makeup doesn’t clip to cling onto the brush like static to skin, but that’s certainly what it looks like from where she’s sitting.
She’s pulled from the brief moment of distraction by Pomni leaning over to bring the blush closer. And Jax must be making some kind of consternated face, because she asks, just to confirm, “You ready?”
Jax nods tightly, unable to tear her eyes away from the pinkish tip of the brush inching towards her face. “Yep, never readier,” she affirms, sounding not even a little bit confident.
Although it’s likely because of how hard she’d been bracing herself for the first contact, the moment the brush touches down beneath her left eye, she rears back, letting out a startled scoff.
“I can’t do it properly if you won’t stay still!” Pomni admonishes, wafting the brush in front of her face like she’s threatening her with it.
Jax huffs away the powder drifting towards her face from the motion. “It tickled!” she rebuts loudly, in a voice that is decidedly not a whine. Pomni just snickers at her, the bastard.
The second attempt is thankfully more successful. The space where her nose would be scrunches with the urge to shake away the featherlight sensations against her digital skin—but once Jax has managed to stop herself from writhing away, it’s barely any time at all until the brush is receding, and Pomni’s asking about what she wants to do next. She picks the eyeshadow, mainly for the sake of getting the powder section over with in one go.
Without focusing too much on the individually rendered strands tickling her face, Pomni is being remarkably gentle. Eyelids are delicate parts of the human form, but Jax technically doesn’t even have them—let alone the kind of body where the ‘skin’ can be broken or blemished in the first place, only… split, like rubber. She could be as careless as she likes with it, really, but she isn’t. As the flinching novelty of the sensation fades, it’s almost relaxing.
Jax doesn’t realise she’s closed her eyes until the brush moves away from her face for the final time. As it is, when they flutter open, the first thing they catch is Pomni’s expression, looking at her in a way Jax feels like she wasn’t meant to see, clear and watching and warm.
She’s not sure Pomni realises her eyes are open either.
“So… what next?” Jax asks, after a long, quiet pause, and thus the moment disperses back into the air.
Jax tosses back and forth on the offered lipstick—unsure of how it might feel when she doesn’t even have lips—but she ultimately decides that she’ll try it at least once. As expected, the sensation of it being applied on her face is a bit strange, with more solid tact to it than the powders, but it’s not quite as bad as she thought it’d be. With the eyeliner on the table being kind of a moot point (“I’ve got it built-in already, isn’t that neat?”), and Jax’s for-the-most-part lack of eyelashes for anything like mascara to stick onto, that’s all the face makeup they have.
Pomni shuffles to the side of the vanity stool. “Do you wanna see how you look?” she offers, patting the space next to her.
And Jax is about to say yes—really, she is—but a bubble-pop of nerves that had sunk away during the process comes back to dig soapy fingers into the base of her neck, and she has the very sudden, slightly nauseating thought that she’s going to look silly, next to Pomni. She wants to look, but what if she doesn’t like it? What if it’s weird? Pomni didn’t mention any wipes; what if she doesn’t have any to remove it with?
She can’t run away from this; she’s not even certain she can get rid of it. Crap.
What can she do instead?
“Let me do your makeup first.” Jax blurts suddenly, though it comes out as less of a question and more of a demand. A problem shared is a problem halved, after all, and perhaps it won’t be so bad if Pomni looks a bit silly, too.
Pomni falters, looking a little surprised. “Um. Sure?”
“I just don’t want you feeling left out!” she justifies jokingly, even though Pomni literally just agreed, before casting a thoughtful look at the jester’s face, and then at the supplies on the vanity table. “I, uh… guess you don’t really need the blush though.” she muses, pointing out the little ovals already painted beneath her eyes.
“What about the eyeshadow and liner, then?”
Jax blinks. “You trust me not to poke your eyes out with that?”
“You cannot do worse than the first time I did it on myself, I promise. There’s a reason I only ever use eyeliner pencils on myself and not this stuff.” Pomni reassures, handing her the tube.
“What, did it look super weird?”
Pomni makes a face somewhere between a smirk and a grimace, glancing away like she’s recalling the memory. “Worse. I pulled the brush and broke the tube—the liquid got in my nose.”
“Eugh, that’s so gross!” Jax laughs, accompanied by an embarrassingly loud snort that makes her grateful for the artificial blush likely covering a real one. Pomni lights up at the sound, though, and it soothes the mortification a little.
Oddly comforted by the hysterical mental image of both Pomni with a nose and snorting liquid eyeliner, Jax opens the eyeliner tube and positions the brush tip near Pomni’s face. “It’s supposed to be, like, a weird triangle shape, right?” she asks, just to check.
“Yeah, a weird bendy triangle.”
Pomni’s eyes close as Jax brings the liner closer, and she has to physically focus on preventing the tremble that wants to take root in her hands. Her eyes are closed, and Jax is centimetres away from her face, and Pomni’s expression is slack and unguarded and she trusts her with this. The intimacy of it all is damn near overwhelming.
“I’m not apologising if it looks bad,” she snarks one last time, hesitating on the first contact.
Pomni shrugs, not even opening her eyes. “Again, whatever it looks like, I’ve definitely done worse to myself—and it’s not like it’s the end of the world if it does look bad. It’s a practice thing.” Because she just has to make everything sound so easy, so straightforward in a moment that feels far bigger than the distance between them.
But with the words wrapped around the room, Jax leans forward that one millimetre more, and brushes the eyeliner against her face.
The end result doesn’t exactly match the image Jax had in her head. It’s visibly clumsy—lines wobbly like she wasn’t sure where she was going with them, and a smudge above one eye where her grip had faltered slightly. The wings are probably different sizes if you look close enough, too. It is, quite obviously, a beginner’s attempt at something a lot of people have been doing for a lot longer.
Nevertheless, at the very least, she didn’t get liquid eyeliner in Pomni’s nose.
“Done,” Jax announces, if only so Pomni can open her eyes again. “You sure you want the eyeshadow too?”
“You can pick the colour,” she replies, which isn’t technically a yes, but is also quite obviously not a no.
There’s a half-temptation to pick something stupid, like the neon green at the back of the little pile, but after a second of battling her most hilarious impulses she decides to play it safe with a red and blue that matches Pomni’s usual colours. It’s nothing fancy—asymmetrical colouring in the same way the rest of her avatar flaunts—but the powder blends into the liquid eyeliner in a way that Jax thinks is sort of cool and, really, it could look worse.
Pomni had leaned forward in the stool to better close the distance between her and the sofa Jax is still sat on, but she moves back to recreate the previous space once they're finished. She doesn’t even look in the mirror herself first—she’s just staring at Jax. “Now do you want to look?”
And, well, if there’s any consolation, it’s that they’ve both committed to it now.
“…I’ve gotta see what you’ve done to my beautiful face at some point, don’t I?”
Slowly, Jax unfurls from the low seat, taking the half step towards the vanity and placing herself down in the space next to Pomni. At first, she’s distracted by the way their sides brush together with the lack of space, her limp hands right beside Pomni’s legs. Irrespective of the sudden temptation to linger, however, Jax tilts her head upwards to look in the mirror.
The reflection finds her and Pomni, side-by-side, wide eyes both taking in the same picture. Her face peers over the angles of Pomni’s hat, framed by the glow of blush that looks oddly glossy for something that was initially a powder. The eyeshadow Pomni used is the same pink as her overalls, a soft spot against the otherwise half-neon colours of her face. The lipstick is only a few shades darker purple than the rest of her, and it’s strange how much difference the meagre contrast makes.
Surprisingly, Pomni’s application looks only a little steadier than her own.
It’s… she’d thought about this a lot, a long time ago, before the circus. Just like she’d thought about a dress. But where the dress had happened for the first time too soon—in a softball stadium, when she hadn’t wanted it, in front of everyone—she’d chosen this. She’d taken her time, made jokes, done it her way.
She’d gotten to do this with Pomni. It’s weird, in that way new things never cease to be—and maybe she needs another few months of practice and it would feel like too much for anywhere outside of this room for now—but it was… fun, to try it with her.
In the mirror, Pomni touches her face at the border of her wobbly eyeliner and, not unkindly, huffs a laugh at what she finds. After hardly more than a second, she turns to meet Jax’s eyes in the reflection. “So… what do you think?”
The question is so familiar on her lips, it’s like she’d heard it only yesterday; in a dressing room to nowhere, for no one’s eyes but their own. It’s been so long since everything started happening. It’s been barely any time at all.
(“Do you like how you look right now?”)
“I think we both look completely ridiculous.” Jax says immediately, and Pomni stoppers on a pout before she sees the bright grin on her face.
The look Pomni gives her is far too knowing. “Good ridiculous?”
“Yeah,” she breathes, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, unable to resist stealing another glance at them both in the mirror, side-by-side. It’s weird, actually being able to see herself happy. “Good ridiculous.”
Pomni smiles, and Jax’s gaze flits between watching it bloom across both the reflection and her real face. “I’m glad.” It almost seems like she’s about to say something else, but her thoughts drift elsewhere, and again the moment passes. “I wanna try the nail polish, but I don’t think either of our gloves are gonna come off. Any suggestions?”
They do make an honest, fruitless effort at pulling at their gloves, but in the end they decide to just paint patterns over the not-quite-fabric with the varnish. Jax paints Pomni’s gloves in random colourful squiggles, a few particular doodles that Caine might censor if he saw them, and exactly one Cool S—and Pomni covers hers in little cartoonish centipedes and stars. She also tries writing a few swear words, but those actually do get censored. Somehow.
(“Oh, come on! You can draw a d%{& but I can’t even write $h!%head?! How is that fair?!”)
They snack in between painting each other’s gloves and waiting for one hand or another to dry. Pomni launches into the crackers—because they’re apparently a staple of her diet—while Jax makes a game of trying to toss the gummy sweets into her mouth and occasionally convinces Pomni to let her throw a few into hers as well. As it turns out, she’s much better at aiming things at other people’s mouths than her own, but still.
Neither of them are quite sure how much time has passed by the time they’ve finished up and eaten all the snacks. Pomni yawns a little as she speaks. “I did have something else planned for tonight, but... I don’t know about you, but I’m kinda beat. Maybe we should just skip straight to going to bed?”
“Aw, what?” Jax complains (in decidedly not a whine). “You can’t just say that you had something planned and not tell me what it is!”
Pomni smirks at her. “I guess you’ll just have to wait until next time to find out.” she replies, teasingly, and—
…Oh.
“You want to do this again?” she falters, unable to conceal her own muted surprise—because Jax liked doing this. She really liked spending time with Pomni. It’s just… it’s been a long time since anyone else has enjoyed the time she spent with them voluntarily.
“Of course I do, this was fun. Best girls’ night I’ve had,” she tells her, and Jax has to work very hard to hide the way her whole body stutters at the words, welling with a something she’s terrified to name. “Now come on, I wanna sleep.”
And that’s that, apparently.
Jax migrated back to the low seat at some point, but Pomni had pulled the vanity stool closer to compensate the already fairly short distance, so she lets Pomni get up first just to avoid them both bumping into each other. It’s only when they’ve both gotten up and Pomni’s heading over to the bed, however, that she realises there’s another problem.
“Damn, I forgot to grab blankets before I left.”
And she knows why she forgot—Ribbit’s room used to have mountains of them, it was never a problem then—but you’d think she’d have considered it before coming over, given how much she’d overthought the whole thing beforehand. At the same time, though, the only thing she’s ever taken out of her room for someone else to see has been her keys. No one in the circus (that’s still around to talk about it, at least) has seen so much a pillow from beyond the confines of her door.
Even if she had realised… would she have brought anything?
(‘It’s Pomni,’ one part of her argues.)
(‘Someone else could have seen,’ defends another.)
(‘Would that really have been the end of the world?’)
Pomni glances up at the tall set of drawers beside the bed. “I think I have a spare duvet in one of those drawers,” she muses, before blinking. “Wait, but why would you need it?”
“Floor’s cold without it, duh—and if I sleep on that chair I’ll definitely wake up with a crick in my neck.” She's almost caught off-guard by the question, for how obvious the answer seems.
Pomni opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it with a snap, thinks for a moment, then opens it again—voice leaving her hesitantly. “You don’t think it’d be easier to just… share the bed?”
“Nah. I’d, like, kick you off in my sleep or something. You’d go pinging around the room like a tennis ball.”
“But you didn’t when—”
“Like a tennis ball.” Jax insists, already reaching for the drawers to see if she can find the one with the spare bedding inside. It doesn’t matter what had happened in the aftermath of that argument, because it didn’t count. It was a fluke.
She doesn’t turn to look at Pomni when she says it; they’ve had such a good night so far, she doesn’t want to ruin it with the way her face is suddenly pulling taut.
She can almost hear the way Pomni hesitates on arguing, but after a moment, she just sighs quietly. “If you say so,” she relents, which is for the best, really. “Uh, maybe try the second drawer from the top?”
Thankfully, the drawer contains both a spare duvet and an extra pillow, so she lays both out on the floor a respectable distance away from the bed—mostly so Pomni doesn’t step on her in the morning by accident. Pomni watches her the whole time she does it, right down to when she’s sitting down and pulling the blanket around herself, but she hurriedly pulls her stare away when Jax returns the eye-contact.
“Well, goodnight!” she announces with an awkward smile, moving to lie down in her own bed and leaning over to turn out the light as she does so. She faces the ceiling as she lies there, neither moving towards or away from Jax.
Jax should probably do the same. Still, though… “Thanks, by the way,” she mutters, leaning into her pillow a little to avoid any expression Pomni might make at the words. “For, you know, all of this. It was a good first girls’ night.”
Pomni pauses for a second—and Jax almost thinks she’s not going to say anything at all—before she sniffs in a way that somehow manages to sound both reassuring and teasing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I did this purely for my own amusement.”
A laugh bubbles out of her, somewhere between surprise and relief and maybe a little bit of offence, because it sounds far too much like something she would say. "Hey, watch it," Jax warns jokingly. But, “In that case, you’re really gonna have to drag me into more of your amusements.” The words leave her half-absorbed by the pillow, urging with one eye already closed. Pomni’s floor is surprisingly comfortable—or maybe it’s just the blankets.
“Duly noted.”
It doesn’t take very long after that for Pomni to fall asleep, and Jax allows herself to indulge in just a few more moments of looking at her before turning over herself. It’s been so long since she’s done something like this. And for however much she’d been torturing herself about it beforehand, it really had been a good time.
That seems to be a running theme, these days; the things she’s been agonising over being not nearly as bad as she thought they would.
As she falls asleep, she wonders if that’ll keep being the case—and when she dreams, it’s of things she knows she won’t admit to in the morning. Makeup and gloves and a vanity mirror, with two bodies practically one in the reflection.