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Jax’s ears twitch.
Everything is sort of fuzzy right now, like he’s looking at the world—what’s left of it—through glass or water or something else. He can’t really feel his body. His skin.
He pinches the inside of his wrist. It stings, but is it really his skin if it can come off so easily? Is it really him? Is this really his body?
Is he really a human?
He’s a doll underneath, like the NPCs. Maybe Jax is an NPC and no one ever realized it. Maybe Jax is just—
“We should,” he hears someone—Zooble, maybe, or Ragatha—say distantly, “probably move somewhere else.”
Jax’s ears twitch.
-
He blinks and he’s in—a room? Maybe? The others are all here, too, but he can’t really see them; they’re just sort of indistinct blobs. There are a few cracks running through the floor, up the walls; a few spots where reality has fallen away. But it’s mostly stable.
Jax doesn’t feel stable.
No one’s trying to talk to him, and he’s grateful for it, because he might shatter if they do. His skin feels too loose and too tight and like it’s not his, like he hasn’t been wearing it for years now. Jax’s ears twitch.
They’re all over on that side and he’s here, trying not to fall apart. He shouldn’t be here, none of them want him here—he can’t blame them. He should have just abstracted when he had the chance, he should have just offed himself that one time when he was a kid, when the pills were right there and no one would have known until it was far too late. Maybe then someone would have cared about him.
It doesn’t really matter now, though. Nothing matters. Jax isn’t even real.
He pinches his wrist; he feels nothing but cold and numb. It’s almost comforting. Different from when he nearly abstracted, more like sinking into a fog that enfolds him in its mists and promises not to let anything touch him. He likes it better than abstracting, than that unnatural calm, that empty pit that had grown in his stomach, eaten up whatever passed for as organs and spread through his whole body until he was nothing but a slave to the kaleidoscope of colors.
Jax’s ears twitch.
He’s feeling it—his ears are the only thing he’s feeling, right now, even though he shouldn’t be, not in this sea of grey where he’s the only one who exists, all alone even with other people right there. He shouldn’t be feeling his ears, because they’re not part of him. They can’t be part of him, they can’t be attached to his body, because if they are, how did they get—how did—
If he pulls on his ears, would they slide off as easily as they did before? Would he feel it?
He’s not feeling much of anything right now, and maybe that’s a problem; maybe he should be frantically swimming towards the surface, desperate for air, for salvation, as the ocean made of his sins tangles his legs, pulls him down, down, down away from redemption and into damnation, into the hell of his own making. And maybe he should care about that, but right now all he cares about is the ease in which his skin was peeled from him.
From his body.
Maybe it took some of his mind with it, Jax muses idly. He’s not all here. He doesn’t really want to be. Here, in the lonely fog blanketing his mind, muffling everything else, all he feels are his ears. They itch and they burn and Jax wants to yank at them until they come off. He already feels stripped bare, vulnerable—why not make it physical, too? What’s the point of keeping these walls up when all they do is collapse in on him and make him yearn for the absolution that is forever inaccessible to him?
It’s always been like that.
Jax has always been alone, even when there were people. He was forever out of reach, even when they were within an arm’s length.
Maybe abstraction is so bad, if it means he doesn’t have to exist like this; this liminal space between everything and nothing, where it’s fuzzy and foggy and lonely where he can’t be bothered.
Jax’s ears twitch.
Sound filters in slowly. Words, garbled and incomprehensible at first, take on form and meaning. Jax doesn’t want to listen to what they’re saying.
What he wants is to—what does he want? Does he want to die? To go back to the real world? Does he want, pointlessly, for everything to go back the way it was before Pomni got here?
Someone’s hand lands on his shoulder, and Jax slowly turns to see Ragatha’s face, creased in concern. A lifeline is thrown on the water, bobbing merrily on the surface, there if Jax just reaches out—
Something heavy ties itself around Jax’s ankle and he sinks so low he can’t see.
A smile spreads itself across his face, and he can’t see it, but it must be as horrific as Jax feels, because Ragatha flinches back, her hand curling back into her side. Jax tilts his head, and Ragatha shivers.
“Jax,” Zooble says—angry, upset, forceful, and Jax turns that too-wide grin onto them, and for once, they fall silent, their eyes widening.
“Oh,” Gangle says softly. Jax’s ears twitch. He wants to tear off his skin, and he can—didn’t Caine just prove that to him? He’s as interchangeable as a doll, something to be played with and then discarded, and Jax is all played out, now, ready to be thrown out.
He doesn’t look at Pomni.
He doesn’t think he could stand to see the look on her face—disgust, alarm, concern—whatever it is, Jax doesn’t want to see it. Pomni hasn’t said anything to him, and Jax is grateful for that. He is, he’s glad Pomni is leaving him alone, and Jax isn’t sad, or upset, or anything like that. That’s what he wanted. He wanted Pomni to leave him alone, he wanted to push her away, he wanted to shut the doors she’d been slowly easing open right in her stupid little jester face.
Jax stands.
The fog has receded just enough for Jax to regain his bearings, and he wishes it would come back—wishes he could lose himself again—it’s better that it let him go a little so he could get out of here.
He can’t stand this, all of them looking at him, and he needs to leave.
“Jax!” Ragatha cries, reaching out to stop him. Jax grins, his pupils swallowing his eyes, and he doesn’t shove her to the side, but he pushes past her all the same, ignoring all the other shouts of his name,
Jax walks fast, faster, faster, and finally breaks out into a run. He dodges the crumbling remains and tucks himself in a small corner. His hand wraps around one of his ears, and he pulls, tugs, yanks—it hurts, it burns, but it doesn’t peel, and Jax is—he’s—
“Fuck,” he whispers to himself, startled despite himself at the lack of censorship. “Fuck!”
He laughs, a manic, hysterical laugh that quickly turns into choked-off sobs. He pulls his knees to his chest and buries his head there, curled up into the smallest ball possible. He doesn't want to go back—back to the others, back to real life, he doesn't know; he just doesn't want to go back.
His skin itches, and his blood thrums too loudly, and he can hear his heartbeat, uncomfortably loud. He hates this. He hates himself. He hates everything. He hates every decision he ever made that led him here. Tears—fake, digital tears, falling from his fake, digital eyes, produced from his fake, digital body—streak down his cheeks, an embarrassing noise accompanying them. He's just glad no one's here to see it. Maybe he can just…stay like this, curled up, tucked away, where no one can ever find him.
He squeezes his eyes shut and tries not to think about—well, he tries not to think. Tries to sink back into the grey. It works, a little; something like a film slides between his awareness and his body. It still hurts. Everything still hurts, and nothing will ever be the same again, and Jax will be alone forever, like he always knew he'd end up. Like he is now.
Jax’s ears burn.