Work Text:
“TWO HOURS!”
“Oh geez…” Jax mutters behind his fork.
“That’s how long I was out there waiting for someone to find me! Two hours! ” Pomni shouts as she storms into the Tent. She’s shivering and soaking wet from being out in the rain. Caine had made the group do an elaborate game of manhunt out on the Grounds for that day’s “adventure,” and Pomni was hiding for what felt like forever, only for no one to find her. “Did nobody think to tell me that the game was over?!”
By the way everyone is seated at the conjured dinner table, already half-finished with their dinner, she has her answer without a word being spoken.
And then Kinger says, “Jax said he saw you go to your room.” He looks over at the purple rabbit.
Jax merely gives a shrug. “Whoops. Guess I was mistaken.” He wasn’t mistaken, Pomni can tell. He just lied for whatever god knows why reason, just to stir the pot. He’s always like, always poking the bear and stoking the fire just so he can entertain himself at the expense of everyone else. And lately, it seems like Pomni has always been the butt of all his jokes.
“Did you guys even look for me?” Pomni says.
“We did!” Ragatha assures her.
“You’re a very good hider, for what it’s worth,” Gangle offers, hoping to make Pomni feel better. It doesn’t. Somehow, it just makes her feel more pissed off.
“Hey, don’t you start trying to guilt trip us,” Jax says.
“I’m not trying to—”
But Jax cuts Pomni off, continuing, “It’s your own fault for waiting out in the rain for over two hours! Don’t point fingers when you could have come in whenever you wanted.”
“I thought the game was still going!” Pomni argues. “And I know you- you probably would have said I was cheating or something if I tried to waltz back into the Tent when it was made abundantly clear by you that the Tent was off limits during the game!”
“Okay, you know what, yeah you’re right,” Jax says, holding his hands up in a surrendering gesture, but there’s undeniable mockery to his movements. “I probably would have made a fuss about it being cheating because, technically, it kind of would be.” He has a smug smile on his face, and he’s obviously fighting the urge to cackle, like this is the funniest standup act in the whole world. “But at the same time…who the hell waits outside for two hours in a rainstorm?! Seriously, you didn’t think, for just one second, ‘Hm, maybe something is wrong here!’ when Caine started the rain? Sorry, but I don’t exactly feel sympathy in this situation, because most people, even me, would have given up after half the time.”
“Jax,” Ragatha steps in, giving him a look, not unlike a mother scolding her son.
“Whaaat?” Jax responds innocently. “It’s true! There was literally no point whatsoever in her continuing to wait outside! It’s the middle of a rainstorm! Why would anyone in their right mind do so?”
Ragatha shakes her head, then looks at Pomni. “We’re sorry for not telling you the game was over, Pomni.”
“But we really did think you went to your room,” Gangle adds. “Jax said you told him you were tired and wanted to take a nap.”
“And you just believed him? Him?” Pomni says. “I mean, did no one think to make sure?”
Jax throws his hands up in exasperation. “That’s not the point! Sure, yeah, I might have given bad info. I’ll take accountability for that, I guess. But my god, Pomni, were you never taught to ‘look both ways’ before crossing the street? Because you essentially just did that with this dumb a[@#] game.”
“What? That doesn’t make any s—”
Once again, she’s cut off by Jax, who talks over her like what comes out of her mouth has zero value whatsoever. “Did you want to win that badly? Because, congratulations! You did win! And it only came at the price of you freezing your bells off!” He leans forward, propping his elbows on the tabletop and resting his chin in his hands. There’s a wide, taunting smirk stretched on his face. He’s goading her. “Tell me, Pomni: was it worth it?”
Pomni curls her fingers into fists, clenches her jaw so tightly her teeth start to ache, feels her temper boil over…and then it fizzles out, and she’s left just feeling pathetic. Pathetic and embarrassed. And also cold and wet.
Is she really arguing with this guy over a game of manhunt? Yes, it stings that nobody looked for her and left her out in the rain without telling her the game was over, but it’s just a game. And here she is, about to have a conniption because of it.
She gives up. “Yeah. Definitely. Super worth it.”
She then walks past the others, heading toward the living quarters so she can get into her room and just wallow. She notices that Jax looks a little disappointed, like he was hoping for a bigger reaction.
“Hon, aren’t you hungry?” Ragatha calls.
Pomni answers plainly, not stopping to look back, “No.”
“Don’t you want to at least sit down and talk with everyone?” Kinger tries.
“Not really,” Pomni responds in the same emotionless tone.
She continues onward, and nobody stops her.
Pomni goes to her room and slams the door behind her. Once she’s alone inside, she rips off her wet jester hat and throws it on the ground. Tears threaten to fall from her eyes, and she hates that she’s about to cry over this.
She knows how ridiculous it is to get upset over a game of manhunt that none of them really care about, but the fact that nobody bothered to tell her the game was over is what really gets to her. That not a single person thought to go check her room to make sure she was in there or invite her to eat.
It’s like she’s just some back thought to them. Out of sight, out of mind.
The others are downstairs having dinner, likely laughing about something that probably happened during the game, and Pomni is up here all by herself. Crying. After waiting in the rain for two hours.
It’s embarrassing. And she hates that she has to feel embarrassed about it.
With that, a flurry of unwanted thoughts in her brain begin to rear their ugly heads.
Everyone—well, everyone minus Jax—are nice to her, but is that all just an act? What if they don’t like her at all? What if they hate her?
After all, she’s the newest person to appear in the Digital Circus. She showed up and threw off the whole vibe they had going on with her presence.
Maybe they never even liked her.
Pomni is a mess by this point, her head spinning from the thoughts racing across her mind. What if nobody likes her? What if they’re all faking it? What if she’s just a pest they put up with for the sake of being nice?
She can barely hold back her tears, her mind flooding with her worst fears. No one bothered to check on her, no one thought twice about her being out in the rain for two whole hours. Everyone just forgot about her entirely.
Pomni can feel herself slipping deeper into a state of panic, but she can’t seem to stop it. The spiral just keeps spinning downwards, and her anxiety only heightens as her mind begins to fixate on how she’s all alone in her room, no one else willing to check in on her despite her being obviously distraught.
But then she begins to think… Maybe it really is her fault for not coming in sooner. That maybe she’s the problem, not the others, and she’s just feebly trying to cast the blame elsewhere to save face. That maybe there is a reason why no one came to check on her and why everyone forgot about her.
That reason is, of course, herself.
Pomni ends up crying herself to sleep that night while torturing herself over this, and when the next morning comes, she wakes up shivering, curled into a small ball on her bed, not even underneath the covers. She feels the unmistakable pressure of a sinus headache in her face, and there’s a very distinct burn in the back of her throat, and she realizes she had fallen asleep in her wet clothes.
Great.
Pomni sits up in her bed, and her entire body seems to groan in resistance. Her whole face is like an orb of pain. It feels as though someone has jammed a cattle prod up her nostrils and electrocuted her nasal passage, and her ears have this uncomfortable pressure in them, causing them to ache. And that’s not even mentioning how her throat is burning like the Devil himself pissed a line of Hell’s hottest fire down the back of it.
She stands, and every movement she makes causes some degree of pain in one of her joints. She grits her teeth and forces herself to move, to stop being so pathetic, but she really and truly feels like the living embodiment of the word “misery” right now.
And, worst of all, she has to go and look at the people who caused her to feel like this, and for some god awful reason, smile at them and act like everything’s fine. But it’s not fine. Nothing is fine. She feels horribly mentally and even more horrible physically.
There’s that anxiety again. Pomni’s mind flashes back to the events of last night.
No.
No, what is she talking about? Everything is A-okay!
Breathe, you stupid b[@#$%].
She needs to stop, needs to calm down, needs to be able to function right now. She has to go down to the main stage and pretend that nothing is wrong at all! Nothing is wrong at all. Nothing. Is. Wrong.
Her face hurts. Her throat hurts. Stop thinking, stop thinking, stop thinking, there’s nothing wrong!
She lifts her hands and places them on the sides of her head, squeezing tightly. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and tries to stay calm.
There’s nothing wrong.
There’s nothing wrong.
There’s nothing wrong.
Slowly, Pomni calms herself as best as she can. She takes all those dark thoughts and shoves them into a bottle, screwing on the cap so they can’t get out.
Everything will be okay.
After making herself somewhat presentable, Pomni takes another deep breath, then heads out of her room.
Everything will be okay.
Everything will be okay.
There’s nothing wrong.
To Pomni’s credit, she’s able to brush off how bad she feels for a few days.
She participates in Caine’s “adventures” like usual, she ignores how her throat burns more and more each morning, she brushes off Ragatha’s concerned looks and Jax’s barbed comments, she fights through the fever.
But, unfortunately, Pomni’s body can only take so much before it crashes, and that crash inevitably comes on the fourth day.
And when she says crash, she means crash. In the most literal way possible.
Pomni isn’t sure why or how, but she’s suddenly been consumed in a supernova of white-hot heat, as though she was standing in front of a nuclear bomb as it went off. The whole world distorts out of focus and grows too bright, inspersed only by flashing black dots that only further obscure her vision. There’s this weird ringing in her ears that’s accompanied by the sound of her own blood rushing and roaring, but beneath that, she swears she can hear several voices shouting somewhere high, high above her.
Her brain is pounding against the walls of her skull like it’s trying to escape her skull and be free from the infernal fever that has been ignited in her body. Her skin is lit in a blazing inferno, yet her bones are simultaneously like rods of ice, freezing to the core. It’s as if Hell itself was unleashed, and Pomni was its first victim.
And then, there’s a touch on her forehead. It’s cool, real.
“Oh, you poor thing…” It’s Ragatha, but her voice sounds as though it’s coming through several layers of static on an old, beat up vintage radio. “She’s burning up.”
“How long has she been like this?” That’s Zooble, their words slurring together to the point where it’s nearly impossible to discern what they’re saying.
“I thought she looked sick…” And that’s Gangle, but it’s like she’s speaking from ten different sides.
Pomni tries to make sense of all of this and just feels her head twist in a few too many directions and gives up. She closes her eyes and tries to block out the world.
Everything hurts. Everything sucks. Everything sucks so much that Pomni feels like she’s going to die right here, right now.
And the worst part of this whole thing is that it’s all because of her. There’s no one to blame but herself. If she’d just told someone sooner, if she hadn’t been a dumbass and waited out in the rain…
Pomni is a failure.
This is all her fault.
The voices around her are getting louder. The pain is worse. It’s like there’s a herd of elephants in her chest, all stampeding and jumping and ripping and tearing her organs apart from the inside.
“Pomni, can you hear me?" she just barely hears Ragatha say. “Pomni?”
Pomni tries to say the word “Yes,” but the single syllable comes out more as a low, raspy gurgle. She’s just too tired and feverish to do more than whisper, and even that is a major effort. Her tongue feels too big in her mouth to speak properly, anyway. The entire world seems to be spinning out of control.
Pomni opens her eyes slightly, and she sees a bunch of blurry blobs of color above her, surrounding her. They morph and distort their shapes as they grow bigger and smaller and then bigger and smaller again. What is she even looking at right now? She can’t tell.
“She needs to be in bed, resting,” Ragatha says. And then, Pomni thinks she’s being lifted up off of the ground, but she can’t be too sure, as her consciousness cuts out a few seconds later.
When she eventually comes to, she’s laying in her bed, and she feels like she’s being smothered by her blanket. There’s a cold, damp cloth pressed to her forehead. She’s very woozy.
“Pomni?”
Pomni looks to the left. Ragatha is seated beside the bed.
“Are you with me, honey?” Ragatha asks. “Can you hear me?”
Pomni tries to respond, but her throat hurts too much, and the effort just isn’t worth it, so she nods feebly instead.
Ragatha replies with a soft hum, adjusting the rag on Pomni’s forehead. “That’s good. It looks like you’ve gotten yourself sick with a pretty nasty virus. Blame Caine for giving us something similar to a fully functioning immune system. Something about ‘realism,’ he had said.” She chuckles softly, a small smile dawning her lips, but the concerned expression twisting her entire face doesn’t leave, and Pomni feels guilty for having her tend to her. “You gave us quite the scare, Pomni. We were so worried about you.”
Hearing that makes Pomni feel two things at once- even more guilt and surprise. Guilt because that’s just more people she’s burdening with her problems (problems that were caused by her own stupidity), and surprise because she’s been vehemently convincing herself that nobody in the Digital Circus likes her and are just tolerating her because they’re forced to share a space with her. But there’s something about the way Ragatha speaks that sounds so genuine. And, deep down, despite her reservations, Pomni wants to believe her. She really, really does.
But she’s not sure she can believe her. Pomni just can’t convince herself that it’s truly possible that these people care about her. In fact, that thought fills her with dread.
It’s too painful to think about the idea that Ragatha and the others actually like her, care about her. They should hate her, hate her, hate her.
With that thought, the anxiety bubbles within Pomni’s heart again.
Why is she like this? What’s wrong with her? Why can’t she just accept that people might actually, genuinely like her? It’s like there’s some kind of poison deep within her that’s making her like this, making her unable to trust, to feel safe, to feel wanted. It’s awful. She hates herself for it. She hates her stupid brain for making her feel this way.
Pomni reaches for her chest, breathing in a short, sharp gasp as the wave of overwhelming fear and panic crashes into her. The panic attack hits her so hard and so suddenly that, for a moment, she actually fears that she’s going to have a heart attack (if that’s even possible in this world), as it feels like her lungs are being squeezed too tight by some kind of monstrous claws, and her heart is about to explode out of her rib cage.
“Pomni?” Ragatha sounds alarmed at how quickly Pomni has started to hyperventilate. “Oh, honey— Hey, hey, shh… Breathe. Deep breaths, Pomni. Deep breaths. In and out.”
Pomni whimpers weakly. In her current state, the sight of Ragatha’s worried expression, one that almost resembles motherly affection, does nothing but make her feel more horrible.
Without thinking, Pomni reaches out and grabs onto Ragatha’s sleeve, gripping it tightly, desperately trying to stay grounded. At least, that’s what she tries to convince herself she’s doing. But Pomni suspects she’s more afraid of being abandoned and left alone than anything else at this point.
Ragatha sweeps her arms around Pomni and pulls her in close. Pomni curls against Ragatha, shaking and wheezing. Having a panic attack while she has the flu is not a fun experience, she’s decided.
“Shh, shh…” Ragatha murmurs, rubbing up and down Pomni’s back. “I’ve got you, sweet girl… I’ve got you… Take deep breaths. You’ve got this, Pomni.”
Pomni nods in response, still clutching onto Ragatha as she takes the advice. She inhales slowly and exhales slowly, and she repeats that for several minutes, trying to calm down and convince herself that the world isn’t burning around her.
Pomni takes another breath, then peeks up to meet Ragatha’s gaze. In her half-conscious state, the look in Ragatha’s eyes is all it takes to make her want to cry again, but she fights the urge as best as she can. Instead, she just squeezes Ragatha tighter and hides her face away again.
“There we go,” Ragatha says. “Good job.”
“I’m…s-sorry…” Pomni mumbles, and she keeps that grip on Ragatha’s arm. As far as she’s concerned, it’s the only thing that’s stopping the world from spinning out of control again, and she’s not ready to lose that sense of security just yet. Letting go can wait until she’s feeling better.
Luckily, Ragatha doesn’t seem to mind.
“You’ve got nothing to apologize for, honey,” Ragatha says. “Nothing at all. I promise.”
The words cut at Pomni, but they strike a different chord than one of guilt or self-loathing. Ragatha’s words aren’t patronizing or condescending but compassionate and concerned—and Pomni is so exhausted she cannot muster another self-deprecating thought.
Pomni takes a shuddering breath, then squeezes Ragatha again. She tries to say thank you, because she needs to thank Ragatha for dealing with her when she’s like this, but even that much talking feels like a herculean effort, so she settles for a single sniffle. Pomni wants to say something else, but she’s too tired to do anything but lay her head on Ragatha’s shoulder. She hopes that she can say more later—she hopes that she’ll have a chance to make it up to Ragatha somehow in the near future.
As Ragatha continues to rub up and down her back comfortingly, Pomni can’t help it when she starts to purr softly, leaning into the touch further.
This is it.
This is what she’s wanted for so long, and it’s finally here.
Pomni knows that her behavior is like that of an unruly kitten, but she doesn’t care. She has too much of a headache and a throat ache and a fever and overall feels too crappy to care about how others see her. And if people think that’s immature or embarrassing, she finds that she doesn’t care about that either. Pomni just wants to be comforted and cared about, and she knows now that she is, at the very least, cared about by one person in this damn Digital Circus.
Upon waking up, Pomni sees that it’s Jax who is sitting beside her bed, probably forced to watch over her by Ragatha. The two of them make eye contact in Pomni’s dark bedroom.
“Ew,” Jax says.
“Ew,” Pomni says back.
And then Pomni passes out again.