Chapter Text
The sky was... wrong again.
Pomni stood at the edge of the courtyard, staring up as the horizon twisted like a warped VHS tape. Cartoony clouds blinked in and out of existence and the Sun smiled just a tad too wide.
Typical day in the Digital Circus.
She rubbed her temples. Something about today felt off. Not just the usual nonsense, no talking teacups trying to duel her, no reality-warping game of hopscotch, no Caine bursting out of the floor with his usual cacophony of unhinged optimism. No, this was different.
Quiet. Too quiet.
“Okay, when even the chaos decides to take a lunch break, that’s usually not a good sign...” she muttered to herself, eyes scanning the scenery like it might suddenly bite her.
Ragatha had gone to check on a flickering light in the kitchen. Kinger was busy debating the politics of snail racing with Gangle. Zooble had vanished an hour ago muttering something about "personal space and actual boundaries," and Caine?
Nowhere to be seen.
Which was weird.
Pomni didn’t trust quiet, not here. Quiet was the kind of thing that happened before the floor turned into lava, or the ceiling grew teeth, or something really stupid got unleashed.
And then the air changed.
A low hum started, like a string being plucked in the back of her skull. Faint at first.
Then louder. Electric. Wrong.
She turned.
There stood a door.
A glowing, pulsing, neon-blue door that definitely hadn’t been there yesterday, or even five minutes ago.
Probably another one of Caine’s warped little adventures.
Pomni stood before it, arms folded, her eyes narrowed with a flicker of suspicion and unease. The door hummed softly, like it was breathing.
“That’s not supposed to be there...” she muttered.
“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock,” came a voice behind her, dry and lazily amused, suddenly appearing as if it materialized from the concept of sarcasm itself.
Pomni jumped so hard she nearly launched herself into orbit, spinning around with a strangled screech. “AAAH—Jax! What the [BEEP]?! You scared the living hell out of me! Where did you even come from?!”
Jax stood with his usual smug grin, arms crossed like he was posing for a sarcastic painting. “Can’t a guy enjoy the ambiance of a mysterious, interdimensional death door in peace? You really gotta work on that fight-or-flight reflex.”
“You’re the reason I have it in the first place..” she grumbled, heart still racing from the mini Jax-scare™.
“Mm. Flattering.” He rocked back on his heels, gaze flicking to the door. “Besides, you were here first. That usually means something incredibly stupid’s about to happen.”
Pomni scowled. “Then why are you still here?”
“Because when you’re involved,” he said with a sly grin, “things are always entertaining.”
She rolled her eyes so hard it hurt, but she didn’t move. The door continued to pulse, louder now, its glow intensifying as if it dared them to touch it.
“Wanna bet it’s a death trap?” Jax asked, tilting his head, eyes glittering with that same chaotic glee.
“Do I even want to find out...?” Pomni sighed, dread crawling up her spine.
He chuckled. “Ooh. Snappy today, Pomni.”
Before she could stop him, he casually reached out and yanked the door open.
===================================================
Inside was, well, chaos.
A labyrinth of shifting walls, twisting corridors, floating platforms hanging over a pit of crackling static. It looked like someone tried to code a funhouse and gave up halfway through debugging it.
Pomni blinked. “This looks... perfectly safe.”
“Ladies first,” Jax said, giving a theatrical bow.
She hesitated. Every instinct screamed to turn back, but she knew Jax well enough to realize leaving him unsupervised in a glitching maze would probably result in fire.
Or worse. Caine getting ideas for more wicked adventures.
With a resigned groan, she stepped inside.
They walked.
The floors blinked beneath their feet. Walls rippled like fabric. Gravity suddenly tilted at random and Jax floated upside down, somehow completely unbothered, arms behind his head like he was sunbathing.
“Having fun?” Pomni asked dryly, clinging to a platform for balance.
“Oh yeah,” he said, spinning lazily. “It’s like Disneyland, but with more bugs than a crappy 1 star restaurant."
===================================================
Eventually, they reached a central chamber.
At the center stood a mirror. It shimmered almost unnatural and dreamlike, and instead of showing their exact reflections when they approached it, it showed versions of them.
Pomni froze.
Her reflection... was smiling. Not the nervous twitch she usually wore like armor, but a full, relaxed, real smile. She looked free. Whole.
That was her in there.. but also not. That Pomni didn’t have shadows under her eyes or a permanent grimace of “please let this be over.” That Pomni didn’t look like she was one sarcastic Jax comment away from a nervous breakdown.
Jax’s reflection wasn’t smirking. His face was calm. Serene, even. Like whatever sharp edge he always kept up had finally dulled.
“What the hell is this?” she muttered, almost afraid to blink.
Jax had gone quiet too. Unnervingly quiet. He stepped forward, just enough that the glowing edge of the mirror shimmered across his face. His eyes were locked on his reflection, but his smirk had vanished.
For a few seconds, neither of them said anything.
“Well, that’s unsettling,” Jax finally said, voice a little too casual. “I look like I’m being pleasant, goodie-two shoes, Gross.”
Pomni side-eyed him. “Sounds like you’re deflecting…”
“Yikes,” he said, feigning a flinch. “Didn’t know I signed up for a therapy session.”
He chuckled dryly, but his laugh was hollow. Like static with no signal behind it.
Pomni didn’t respond. She was still staring at her reflection, transfixed. Something about seeing that version of herself being genuinely happy, for lack of a better word, made her body feel odd.
“I don’t get it,” she said quietly. “Why is it showing us that?”
Jax tilted his head, considering. “Some kind of... mind maze trick? Y’know. ‘Look at the people you’ll never be’ and spiral into existential dread?’” He said it like a joke, but there was an edge underneath.
“That’s comforting,” she muttered.
Then the mirror cracked.
A sound like glass and electricity splintered the quiet. The room began to glitch, extremely hard. Walls folded in. The floor cracked. A chasm opened beneath Pomni’s feet, static roaring like wind.
She fell.
She screamed.
Then a hand.
It was Jax. Grabbing her wrist mid-drop and yanking her quickly and forcefully back onto the flickering ledge, causing them to hit the ground in a tangled heap.
For a few long, terrifying seconds, everything blinked. White noise and darkness flickered back and forth like a dying signal.
And then—stillness.
Pomni groaned, disoriented. “Are we... dead?”
“Nope,” Jax muttered from beneath her. “Unfortunately.”
Her senses began to stabilize. Slowly. Painfully. Her limbs ached from the fall, and there was a buzzing pressure in her head like her brain had been rewired with TV static. She shifted slightly.. ..and froze.
What she was laying on wasn’t ground.
Not unless the ground had recently become squishy, warm, and definitely breathing.
She blinked down.
Chest.
His chest.
Jax’s chest.
Her hands were flat against it. His fur soft beneath her fingers, rising and falling with his breath. And there he was. Right beneath her. Eyes half-lidded, smug and stunned and mixed with something unreadable all at once, like even he hadn’t planned this far ahead in the chaos.
They were tangled together, limbs overlapping, her legs draped over his like a very awkward pretzel of awkwardness sprinkled with odd tension.
Pomni's face went bright red almost instantly and she scrambled off him, she was so fast she might as well have teleported, almost kicking him in the face in the process of trying to jump away from him.
“I-You-That-” she sputtered, waving her arms in a frenzied, uncoordinated fashion while attempting to form a sentence. “That was not on purpose!”
Jax sat up with a groan, brushing nonexistent dust off his overalls, his usual smirk creeping back into place on his face. “Shame. I was enjoying the view.”
“JAX!” she shrieked, voice cracking like a young teenage girl going through puberty.
He laughed, like, really laughed, not the usual half-scoff or snarky breathy thing he did when amused. It was full and surprised, like he hadn’t expected it either.
“Relax, Pomni. You’re not my type.”
That shouldn’t have stung. It really shouldn’t have. But somehow it did just the tiniest amount.
She turned away, pretending to check her surroundings, anything to avoid looking him in the eye again. His gaze was making her head hurt more than her earlier impact.
“Whatever. Where even are we now?” She mumbled, quieter than before as the burning in her cheeks slowly faded.
The room, or what was left of it, was different, dimmer. The mirror was gone, replaced by a distorted outline where it had once stood, as if reality itself had given up trying to load. The walls around them flickered in and out like a half-rendered game map, bits of code dangling like threads from the seams of the world.
Great, now they were lost in a place they definitely weren’t supposed to see... in one of Caine’s unfinished projects that he's forgotten about.